Steve Armstrong is president and CEO, Genome Atlantic; Carl Weatherell is executive director and CEO, Canadian Mining Innovation Council; Jean Vavrek is executive director, Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum.
Canada is fortunate to have a plethora of natural resources. In Nova Scotia alone, the mining industry is turning some of those resources into 5,500 jobs, contributing $420 million to the annual economy, and of course, providing the raw materials for products that are used every day.
But all of that doesn’t come easily. Globally, the mining sector faces environmental challenges, rising production costs, and fluctuating prices that warrant substantial interest in discovering new solutions to extract these resources in the most efficient and sustainable way.
Deloitte’s 2014 Tracking the Trends report on mining says: “Miners should innovate by adopting technologies to enable mine design and planning, energy supply, as well as adoption of emerging technologies.”
One of those emerging areas of technology is genomics — the combination of genetics, biology and computer science that studies the DNA in a living organism. This may seem an unusual focus for a sector like mining, but hidden within the rocks and dirt are countless communities of microscopic organisms known as microbes (such as bacteria) that could play a gigantic role in the sector.
These microbial consortia are tremendously diverse and resourceful. They have been around for billions of years, and can thrive in environments that are toxic to humans.
Around the world, the mining industry has been using microbes to safely remediate for quite some time. Much of the world’s copper is actually extracted by microbes (bioleaching). So these biological approaches are technically not new. What has changed is our ability to study these complex little beings through genomics-based technologies.
With genomics, we’ve gained a remarkable ability to understand these microbial communities. We are finding species that have never been identified before, and learning how they are behaving in these unique environments. The more we understand what makes them tick, the more opportunities there are to leverage their application in mining and other resource sectors.
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