An ERC grant to study primitive life forms
Micrographic image of a bacterium that has reduced uranium. © Paul Shao – EPFL 2017
Associate professor Rizlan Bernier-Latmani has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant. Her laboratory will use the funds to carry out a ground-breaking research project combining fundamental and applied research.
Rizlan Bernier-Latmani, an associate professor and head of the Environmental Microbiology Laboratory, was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant in November 2016. This EUR 2 million grant is awarded to up-and-coming young scientists.
The microbiologist won over the evaluation panel with her original topic combining fundamental and applied research. It brings together two of her lab’s specialty fields: transforming uranium through microbial and chemical processes, and observing uranium’s specific fingerprint as it undergoes biological transformation (uranium isotope fractionation).
Professor Bernier-Latmani explored this latter subject in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2015. Her research showed that uranium leaves a distinct biological fingerprint when it is transformed by bacteria. Her new project is original in that she will study this phenomenon in rocks dating back to when the Earth was still in its infancy.
“We will probe for this fingerprint in rocks that are three to four billion years old. Our measurements will allow us determine when microorganisms first appeared on the planet. They will also help us study their metabolism, such as whether they produced methane or respired sulfate.”
With the support of the ERC grant, Professor Bernier-Latmani’s project will deepen her and her research team’s understanding of uranium transformation through microbial processes. The data they gather could also have applications in other fields, such as engineering and radiochemistry.
The project will officially start at EPFL on June 1st 2017.
ERC Consolidator Grant:
UNEARTH: Uranium isotope fractionation: a novel biosignature to identify microbial metabolism on early Earth