Narrator:        This is Science Today. A team of University of California researchers has discovered that microbial proteins can be used to improve water quality. Peter Weber, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says bacteria growing in groundwater at an abandoned mine in Wisconsin excreted proteins that not only reduced sulfate, but also caused the aggregation of heavy metal nanoparticles in the water. The goal is to utilize this process in efforts to clean the environment.  

Weber:            One way would just simply be to take the proteins, the components of the proteins and manufacture them at some level and putting them into a system in such a way that it would cause the precipitation of potential pollutants.

Narrator:        Weber says the U.S. Department of Energy is already using microbes in the Pacific Northwest.

Weber:            So, it's already something that people are doing out there - trying to use microbes to get heavy metals, other contaminants out of groundwater. And this would just be another entrée where people could use the knowledge of microbes as it were to clean up a system.

Narrator:        For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.