Comprehensive Site Assessments

Microorganisms are ubiquitous in the environment and have evolved to a variety of essential functions to ensure survival, even in the world’s most harsh conditions. They play a vital role in the natural recycling of organic and inorganic compounds. If one understands these bacterial communities and their functionality, it can explain many “dark questions” of major environmental contamination problems.
Through its in-house contributions and international independent verification with selected service providers, iWater provides the latest informative molecular biological tools.

The iWater team, with their extensive expertise, can help clients to understand the environmental challenges of a specific environment. They can also assist in implementing effective remediation strategies to solve the problem of pollutants and contamination for industrial companies, biological research groups, water suppliers, or even local farmers.

In addition to chemical, environmental stable isotope and biokinetic assessments, iWater can provide molecular biological tools to assist clients in understanding environmental challenges and the effects thereof in their unique environments.

These tools include:

• metagenomic sequencing analysis,
• data generation and processing,
• and bioinformatic assessments with advanced computational abilities

iWater has evaluated a range of typical and extreme environments to benchmark the best options to enable their client’s decision-making process, to understand their biological diversity or to increase the efficacy of treatment strategies. The tools allow clients to identify the entire indigenous microbial diversity up to the genus level, and with special analysis even to the species level.

iWater is in a position to provide the knowledge and experience needed to integrate microbial diversity with the surrounding geochemical – and physicochemical data to support informed decision-making with clients. It will enable them to use changes in the microbial community over time or after an environmental event, e.g. the addition of toxins or spills.

The tools iWater can add are more on microbial functionality – the core question for all environments. This permits them to identify specific contaminant-degrading microbes and even their functional genes. iWater uses custom pipelines and optimisation for functionality and will infer the potential functional capabilities with peer-reviewed literature of cultured representatives. The description of the bacterial community structure and its dynamics leads to a better understanding of the natural degradation processes and can ultimately direct treatment strategies for controlled bioremediation processes.

The data descriptions will indicate if the microbial communities are dominated, for example, by chemoheterotrophic – or heterotrophic organisms. Specific dominant metabolisms can also be showcased (e.g. nitrate – or sulphate metabolism).