By Neal Reid
One of the strengths of Auburn University’s army of researchers is the ability to apply theoretical and fundamental research to real-world problems, and a pair of scientists from the College of Sciences and Mathematics (COSAM) are doing exactly that.
Evert Duin from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Rodney Tollerson II from the Department of Biological Sciences are working hard to find advancements at the microbial level that could potentially reduce the amount of methane gas in the environment. Scientists have long determined that excess methane in our atmosphere has magnified and exacerbated issues such as rising temperatures, ecosystem destruction and resource waste, and these researchers are looking for ways to combat those negative ripple effects from the inside out.
Evert Duin
For Duin, an Auburn faculty member for more than 20 years, his work is centered on developing advancements in biochemistry that can lead to practical applications that help the environment by reducing methane. His laboratory team is doing this in several ways, and he is collaborating with a multitude of faculty members both inside and outside COSAM to discover far-reaching processes designed to exact change.
“A lot of what we do is fundamental research to find out how proteins and enzymes work,” said Duin, a native of the Netherlands who earned his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam. “We look at a protein that produces methane, and you find it in a lot of places in nature. Human activity actually causes a lot more methane that escapes the natural cycle. Normally, nothing gets out, but humans keep disturbing those cycles, and that’s the problem.”
Duin is part of a team that includes researchers from the University of Florida and Clemson University who are using a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to find ways to limit the amount of methane produced by bovines.
“Cows produce a lot of methane by the enzymes that are produced in their stomachs since they cannot digest grass without them,” Duin said. “We’re looking to find inhibitors for the methane production. A lot of people are worried about their carbon footprint, and the beef industry does produce a lot of methane.
“You can vaccinate a cow against the organisms that produce methane by generating antibodies that attack the protein, but there are 10 or 15 organisms you have to vaccinate against, and that can be expensive.”
Duin said the development of food additives that limit the hydrocarbon’s production means beef cattle actually grow more efficiently and therefore provide a better yield for beef farmers.
Duin worked with a team from Switzerland that produced a breakthrough, Dsm-Firmenich’s Bovaer food additive, that made TIME magazine’s “The Best Inventions of 2024” list. The product has been shown to reduce methane emissions by 30% in dairy cows and 45% in beef cattle. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for sale in several countries to farmers and others in related industries who are committed to lowering methane emissions.
While much of Duin’s work focuses on animals, his research also can be applied to the oil and gas industry, which, according to Duin, produces roughly 50% of the methane in the environment. Finding ways to lower that number is of great concern to all involved.
“If you drive past a refinery or an oil field, you’ll see big flames, and that is the burning off of the methane from the oil,” said Duin, who has had research funding from ExxonMobil in the past. “They don’t know what to do with the methane, and the amount of methane that’s being burned off is a huge waste that is cost-prohibitive. We’re trying to figure out if we can take enzymes and grow them in other organisms to create a pathway to convert the methane into a compound that’s useful for industry. The organisms can do it, so we should be able to figure it out.”Duin said the development of food additives that limit the hydrocarbon’s production means beef cattle actually grow more efficiently and therefore provide a better yield for beef farmers.
Duin worked with a team from Switzerland that produced a breakthrough, Dsm-Firmenich’s Bovaer food additive, that made TIME magazine’s “The Best Inventions of 2024” list. The product has been shown to reduce methane emissions by 30% in dairy cows and 45% in beef cattle. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for sale in several countries to farmers and others in related industries who are committed to lowering methane emissions.
While much of Duin’s work focuses on animals, his research also can be applied to the oil and gas industry, which, according to Duin, produces roughly 50% of the methane in the environment. Finding ways to lower that number is of great concern to all involved.
“If you drive past a refinery or an oil field, you’ll see big flames, and that is the burning off of the methane from the oil,” said Duin, who has had research funding from ExxonMobil in the past. “They don’t know what to do with the methane, and the amount of methane that’s being burned off is a huge waste that is cost-prohibitive. We’re trying to figure out if we can take enzymes and grow them in other organisms to create a pathway to convert the methane into a compound that’s useful for industry. The organisms can do it, so we should be able to figure it out.”
Searching for microbial answers
Tollerson, an assistant professor, focuses his research on microbial methane metabolism processes and how microbes might adapt and respond to varying or changing environmental factors. The work, he said, is designed to find answers to a litany of questions, including how methane production might be decreased in the environment at the microbial level.
“One of the major goals of the lab is to understand the way that methane production is regulated by the organisms,” said Tollerson, who earned his doctorate at The Ohio State University. “We are looking at this at the genetic level to see what genes are being made to lead to the production of methane and how the cell turns that gene on or off depending on its environment.”
Once Tollerson determined his research niche would involve an intersection of microbiology and genetics, he zeroed in on a major problem to solve — how methane excess negatively affects the environment. One particular yin-yang scenario involving microbial organisms — the organisms involved in the cycle referred to by Duin — is particularly fascinating to Tollerson and his research team.
“A lot of these organisms are what we call methanogens, and they are called that because they make methane,” he said. “I’m interested in the way those microbes respond to different perturbations, like changes in temperature or a change in acidity, since our oceans are becoming more acidic.
“We also are interested in how methanotrophs — which eat methane — are going to respond, because if they consume less, that means more is getting out into our atmosphere. That fascinates me because I think it’s something that can produce a tangible change.”
Rodney Tollerson II
By learning more about methane production, Tollerson hopes to one day be able to formulate methods to reduce it in the environment, which could slow global temperature increases and other troubling trends that are ripple effects of a central problem.
“The goal is to try to slow atmospheric temperature increases, or at least understand them,” he said. “If we can understand just one small portion of this, then we can potentially better predict what’s going to happen in the future. Then, maybe we can start engineering the methanotrophs in a way that we can grow them in the lab in large enough amounts that they can start pulling methane out of the atmosphere, enough to have a tangible impact on our planet.”
