Abstract

The mining industry is facing unique challenges that require creative solutions. The increased prevalence of extreme storms, flooding, and fires coupled with increasing pressure for “green” energy is driving market demand for the raw materials needed to provide products such as electrical infrastructure, steel and batteries. Concurrently, societal and regulatory pressures for providing these raw materials with less environmental impact than conventional methods are at an all-time high. As the rate of advance of chemical and physical technologies wanes, biology is emerging as the new frontier for solutions in the mining industry. While the geochemical profile at mining sites is usually extensively characterized, the microbiome is largely unexplored even from a basic diversity standpoint, let alone in terms of understanding genetic potential. This is even more pronounced when it comes to fungi. The unexplored power of biology in mining has potential for a broad range of applications, including biocementation, carbon sequestration, ore beneficiation, mine-impacted water mitigation, bioleaching, metals recovery, metals separation, revegetation, environmental monitoring, and more. As part of our work on these applications, Allonnia has obtained samples from mine sites in Australia, Africa, and North America to characterize the microbiome in these mineral-rich environments and begin to understand the genetic potential.  We extracted DNA for amplicon sequencing and taxonomic analysis not only for bacteria and archaea, but also for fungi. In addition, we isolated hundreds of organisms on various media types to facilitate whole genome sequencing that can be used not only to improve our taxonomic analysis, but also to better understand potentially relevant metabolic pathways already present in the microbiome. The microbial composition even within an individual mine site displays substantial diversity and is unlike other characterized ecological niches. Further, the diversity from site to site is much greater. This suggests that the untapped biological potential globally across mine sites is enormous. A new tool to help understand this global potential is the Mining Microbiome Analytical Platform, or M-MAP, being developed by a consortium of mining, engineering and biotechnology companies and the University of British Columbia, with support from the Canadian government. To start, M-MAP will provide a georeferenced framework for microbiome data from over 10,000 samples collected at mine sites across North America. M-MAP’s scalable software tools will include search functions and analysis modules to query the mining microbiome for specific organisms or genetic capabilities relevant to the problems of interest. Much work remains to harness the power of biology in mining applications for maximum benefit, but these initial forays provide great promise regarding the possibilities.