Industry-Sized Questions, Microscopic Answers
The global adoption of greener technologies like electric vehicles and wind turbines requires the extraction of raw minerals at rates that exceed what traditional mining practices can deliver. Backed by Canada’s Technology Supercluster, this consortium-led project is revolutionizing the mining industry by looking for solutions to mining’s biggest challenges in their tiniest miners – the resident microbial community.
We worked with our consortium partners (including mining giants Teck Resources and Rio Tinto) to develop the Mining Microbiome Analytics Platform (M-MAP), an online platform that is accelerating the development of eagerly-awaited microbial solutions for mining. With this platform, our team is extracting key information about microbial communities from mining-related environments to understand “who” is there and “what” they are doing. These insights empower mining companies to embrace next-generation biomining technologies, and to deploy custom data-backed solutions.
Microbiome analytics is catalyzing the development of state-of-the-art environmental practices across the mining lifecycle: a “green” approach to resource extraction and mine site remediation that aims to significantly reduce, and ultimately eliminate, the use of toxic chemicals, develop more efficient mining practices, and reduce adverse environmental impacts. M-MAP represents the largest investment in planned natural resource genomic bioinformatics in the history of the sector.
Learn more here: https://www.m-map.ca/
