1Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering, www.scelse.sg

SCELSESingapore Centre on

Environmental Life Sciences Engineering

NewsletterNovember-December 2014

CalendarSCELSE Seminars

11am -12pm,

Regular seminar venue: SBS-08Commence 22 Jan, 2015: Seminar speaker TBA

Group meetingsEnvironmental Engineering Meeting: Fridays 9am, B3 Meeting Room

Faculty & Fellows Meeting: 2nd Friday of each month, 10 am, B3 Meeting Room

Seminar organisers for 2015:Caroline Chenard, Rafi Rashid and Martin Tay

Conference update

SCELSE has been invited to join an aspiring global venture; together

with the Tropical Marine Sciences Institute (TMSI) in Singapore, the research centre recently joined hands with the Sydney Institute of Marine Science (SIMS) in an international collaboration on the World Harbour Project (WHP).

The project was officially launched on the 17th November 2014 at the IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney. The initiative has garnered widespread attention, establishing initial partnerships in 12 countries - New Zealand, Spain, Abu Dhabi, Brazil, Australia, China (Shanghai and Qingdao), Italy, Indonesia, USA, Grenada, Hong Kong, and Singapore, with more expected to join in the coming months.

The project is an urgent nudge towards the exploration and study of the global challenges facing our heavily urbanised waterways, and finding solutions, both scientific and managerial to the development of resilient urban ports and harbours.

Many of the world’s major cities border along coasts and estuaries. These waterways and harbours are closely interwoven into the fabric of society; they are excessively used and interacted with on a daily basis: border control, education, religion, leisure, travel, business etc.

WHP will take harbour research and management to a global level, enabling the novel integration of approaches used by various cities to

understand and manage the usage and maintenance of their waterways.

“To arrive at a more complete understanding of harbour ecosystems and take advantage of the comparative networks is crucial for further development and management of coastal marine ecosystems in Singapore and around the globe,” said SCELSE Centre Director, Prof. Staffan Kjelleberg.

WHP will intially focus on establishing a global network of interacting scientists, institutions and agencies and slowly expand to include targeted workshops, coordinated exchange of researchers and students, explicit research and rehabilitation or policy projects.

No previous undertaking has linked research and management across urban marine environments on such a scale. SIMS will be playing a facilitation and administrative role in the project.

Start-up projects are currently being steered into green engineering, to selectively incorporate living organisms onto engineered structures to minimise their environmental impact.

IWA Specialist Conference on Global ChallenGes for sustainable WasteWater

treatment and resourCe reCoveryBeautiful Kathmandu played host to this inaugural iWa specialist conference in

early novemBer. scelse phd student anisa coKro explains.

World Harbour Project: A global understanding of our harbours To all at SCELSE,

Thanks for your tremendous efforts throughout such a

momentous year. During 2014 we reached our

3rd year milestone, completed a rigorous review and received highly favourable reports from

our assessors.This year, SCELSE has also attained significant funding for our strategic research

programs, thus adding to our solid position for the Centre’s

next phase.You have all played an integral

role in SCELSE’s success. I look forward to another exciting year of continued

research excellence.

Best wishes for 2015

Staffan

Director’s message

Renowned scholars, leaders, practitioners and scientists from

across the globe attended the conference to discuss the latest in technologies and approaches for energy neutrality, resource recovery, sanitation and sustainable water treatments.

New technologies that are more energy efficient were explored. There was great interest in short-cut nitrogen removal, and low energy resource/valued product production, such as production of biopolymers using photosynthetic bacteria to reduce energy used in aeration.

Interest in centralised vs decentralised systems led to discussions outlining the

utility of a hybrid alternative where some centralisation was maintained to ensure standards were met.

The focus on process and economic efficiency, while lowering environmental footprints was emphasised, as was the importance of government committments, or “green deals” for ensuring continued progress in resource recovery.

The conference featured representatives from legislative as well as scientific fields, enabling a broader perspective and discussion. However, much could also have been gained by including a public perspective in the discussions. Perhaps future meetings will engage this aspect.

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scelse neWsletter

Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering, www.scelse.sg

SCELSE people profile

Latest publications

Dr Kimberly Kline joined SCELSE in 2011, shortly after being awarded the National Research Foundation

Fellowship for which she was hand-picked from among 174 applicants worldwide. She and her team of researchers at SCELSE are developing physiologically relevant models to study pathogenic biofilms.

“The standard models in the field grow biofilms on mostly plastic materials. This approach is not necessarily the best in studying pathogenic biofilms and their interactions with the host,” Kimberly said.

“We are more concerned with the direct interactions between the two and are seeking more reliable and relatable models that are able to transparently reflect this relationship without having to use animals,” she added. Her team is also expanding its study to include mixed-species biofilms.

Kimberly was recently awarded the prestigious ICAAC Young Investigator Award for her outstanding accomplishments in Enterococcal infection pathogenesis and treatment. The ICAAC (Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy) Young Investigator Award is presented to early career scientists for research excellence and potential in microbiology and infectious diseases by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM).

Her nominator, Michael Gilmore (Harvard Medical School) said Kimberly is “making extremely novel

Kimberly KlineNanyang Assistant Professor

Matrix exopolysaccharides, Psl and Pel make distinct

rheological contributions in the formation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms. By increasing the elasticity and effective cross-linking within the matrix, Psl strengthens the biofilm scaffold and appears to facilitate the formation of microcolonies (vertical growth). Conversely, Pel was observed to undo the effects of its counterpart by reducing effective cross-linking, and instead encouraging biofilm spreading.

The probe into the microstructure of

a wild-type biofilm revealed a decrease in the effective cross-linking within the matrix of the microcolonies over time.

Is this an internal strategy to aid the spread and colonisation of new surfaces? Perhaps. Researchers have reason to believe that there are certain regulatory mechanisms set in place within the biofilms that are able to modulate the selective secretions of these molecules, which then play a dynamic role in modeling and remodeling the biofilm structure.

Matrix structural and rheological properties at the microscale influence the retention and transport of molecules and cells in the biofilm,

dictating population and community behaviour. Understanding the micro-architectural changes triggered by the different structural molecules will go a long way in elucidating the nature of biofilms.

The exopolysaccharides Pel and Psl also serve roles that are crucial to the spatial organisation and species integration within a dual-species biofilm comprising P. aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus.

Pel integrates P. aeruginosa into the mixed-species biofilms, while Psl promotes species segregation and monospecies biofilms. Here, Psl aids layer formations, with P. aeruginosa forming a single-species biofilm layer on top of the S. aureus biofilm.

Newsletter contact:Sharon: sharonlongford@ntu.edu.sg

discoveries on polymicrobial communities in infection, and identifying novel targets for new antimicrobial agents.”

“Having been nominated by my peers, this is indeed a great honour for me,” Kimberly said.

Dr Kline earned her BA in Biology from St Olaf College in Minnesota. She has a Masters of Public Health and PhD (graduating in 2005), both with Hank Seifert’s group at Northwestern University. Kimberly continued as a postdoctoral fellow with Scott Hultgren at Washington University, St Louis. During this time she was also a visiting postdoc in Birgitta Henriques-Normark’s and Staffan Normark’s group at the Karolinska Institute.

From an early stage in her career, Kimberly’s research efforts have been highly recognised. She

was an American Heart Association Fellow, Carl Tryggers Fellow, and NIH K99 Career Development Award recipient.

Having had many years of research experience, she says the best part of her job is working with her researchers and students; observing their progress and enthusiasm throughout the duration of their projects.

She also shares with us a few words of wisdom on persistence: “ Research is a few peaks and many valleys. Experiments fail for many reasons. Being able to persevere through all those failures is what makes a successful and happy scientist.”

Outside the lab, Kimberly loves cooking, running and playing with her dogs, Grendel and Dulcey.

profileTo grow up or out?