Research Projects
The Ford group studies chemotaxis and its applications to environmental and medical systems.
The Role of Chemotaxis in Marine Microorganism Transport Toward Hydrocarbon Component in An Oil Spill
Chemotactic bacteria have the ability to sense the hydrocarbon pollutant gradient, swim toward it and further degrade hydrocarbons. This process can increase the mass transfer of chemotactic bacteria to the hydrocarbon pollutants and can increase biodegradation. The objective of this research is to quantify bacteria motility and chemotactic parameters in order to understand what extent does chemotaxis contribute to increasing the transport process of hydrocarbon-degrading marine bacteria to oil droplets. This proposed work is important to understand the extent to which bacterial chemotactic processes contribute to marine bacteria migration to hydrocarbons. It will also provide information on bacteria migration in complex contaminated marine environment.
Bacterial chemotaxis toward discrete hydrocarbon sources
Chemotactic bacteria can migrate preferentially to attractants like hydrocarbons, and potentially increase the efficiency of bioremediation in contaminated area. This study aims at multiple length and time scales to investigate the conditions where chemotaxis will overcome the mass transfer limitation in the biodegradation reaction. Numerical simulation was utilized to visualize bacterial distributions inside a sand column packed with discrete hydrocarbon sources. Two microfluidic devices were designed and fabricated to directly observe bacterial behaviors near 1) oil droplets trapped in a heterogenous media and 2) an oil-water interface, respectively. We hypothesize a dimensional scaling method to relate the observations in different length and time scales. This method can help evaluate the importance of chemotaxis for in situ treatment.