Largus Angenent harnesses the power of microbes to provide fuel and electricity while cleaning waste.

Ecologically speaking, there is no waste. Everything is recycled and microbes do the heavy lifting. What we call waste is, in Angenent’s eyes, really just a wasted resource. Microbes can turn pig and cow manure into biogas, corn stalks into alcohol fuel, and industrial wastewater into electricity. “This technology needs to be developed,” he says. “We need to use our waste.”

Using changes in temperature, pH, and other factors, Angenent and his research group engineer communities of microbes—like those found in municipal and residential wastewater treatment systems—for optimal waste processing. “We are trying to steer the microbial community in different directions for different wastes,” he says.

The communities Angenent works with are very diverse, containing thousands of species from three domains of life: bacteria, eukaryotes, and archaea. His group uses techniques borrowed from molecular biology, like polymerase chain reaction, followed by sequencing to identify individual species and deduce their complex relationships within the community. “We have specialists that break down certain things,” says Angenent. “Some produce waste that then gets eaten by another microbe.”

Angenent has partnered with Anheuser-Busch in Baldwinsville, N.Y. to see how the microbial community living in its anaerobic digester can be tweaked to treat solids. The brewery currently turns the soluble organic matter in its wastewater into methane that can be burned to generate electricity and heat. If the microbes could handle the solids in the wastewater too, the energy yield would be increased considerably.

Microbes used in industrial processes like this can be long serving employees. “These are steady state communities that can operate for 30 years,” says Angenent.

Angenent has developed a microbial fuel cell that could turn wastewater into electricity on a large scale. To improve its power output, he is using functional and comparative genomics to unravel what makes certain strains of bacteria better at transporting electrons. Keeping a microbial fuel cell alive requires constant care. “It’s like a baby. You need to feed it every day,” he says.

Angenent is originally from the Netherlands, where Anton van Leeuwenhoek first discovered the microscopic world in 1675. He was up for tenure review at Washington University in St.  Louis, but decided to come to Cornell instead. “The stuff that I do fits much better at Cornell,” he says. “I was a little bit of an island in St. Louis. Here there are many more people I can talk to.”

As exciting as his research is, what Angenent enjoys most is working with young people. “It can be a struggle because you’re working with people who need to be trained,” he says. “But when the project is done, the thesis is written, and the papers are out, you see that all the struggling was worth it. It’s very rewarding to see the students come out with additional skill sets."

The Angenent Lab