When was the last time you played in some dirt? For Dr Amanda Ramdass, having her hands in the soil became more than a childhood pastime—it was a place of discovery. But it wasn’t the dirt itself that was the source of her fascination, instead her interest was in the tiny creatures that called it home: microbes.
A researcher within UWI St Augustine’s Department of Life Sciences (DLS), her work focuses on studying the ability of specific microbes to degrade pollutants in contaminated soil, for instance, in oil spills and seeps. By uncovering what makes these microbes so well-suited for cleaning up their natural environments, her hope is that we can harness their unique makeup for the purpose of widespread bioremediation—solving some of the pollution issues that have degraded our natural ecosystems and contributed to our worsening global environmental crisis.
It all started with a lab project that Ramdass was supervising while doing her own postgraduate studies in Biochemistry.
“I was supervising the undergraduate students, while doing their final year research projects,” says Ramdass. “It was one of those projects that we got the plates from Professor [Adesh] Ramsubhag [Head of the DLS].”
This was what she called their “little pilot study”. The biochemistry plates, which started out entirely covered in oil, were nearly completely clear by the end of their study. “When we saw that, we said, ‘oh my goodness, we need to know what is happening on that plate.’ And not just on a visual level, but we need to know genetically.”
What Ramdass and her supervisor Dr Sephra Rampersad (Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry) found, was that wherever the soil had been contaminated with crude oil, there were indigenous microorganisms that had developed a taste for it. Bacteria, fungi, yeast—these little lifeforms are experts at “environmental detoxification”.
While utilising microbes for bioremediation has been explored in other parts of the world, the makeup of microbes varies according to where they’re from, and there hasn’t been much data on what has evolved in the tropics. But Ramdass and Rampersad were determined to change that.
There would be a wide diversity of microogranisms with bioremediation potential to be explored, but some were better for the job than others. So, the team had to test and isolate the compounds that made for good pollution cleanup, which meant putting together what could be described as an oil degrading competition. But first they had to find the contestants, which meant field work, which meant playing in some dirt.
At the southernmost edge of the island is the village of Marac, near to the Bunsee Trace Mud Volcanoes. For Ramdass, the long drive meant an inevitable bout of car-sickness. But after braving the nausea, blistering heat and getting stuck by “big, big, big pickers” on the way to their field work spot, there was a wealth of information to be found.
“It was really cool though, when we actually reached the site,” she says. At the mud volcanoes, she found what she was looking for. “I would never have expected to see these little things spitting up not only mud, but oil.” These “natural seeps” were a prime location for samples, which were dug up with a shovel, placed in sterile bags, and taken on the windy journey back to the lab.
Her research took her to rivers, oil pipelines, and abandoned wells across different parts of Trinidad. And although there was a level of scientific fascination, she was also struck by the reality of what was happening in these rural areas.
“We got to see, live, what the pollution looks like. How bad it was.”
Thick, black, raw oil, spread over large areas, each one a graveyard of wildlife that had been caught in the slick. And while these occurrences are devastating for animal and plant life, they have a grave impact on the people as well.
Dr Amanda Ramdass in the field collecting samples and in the lab conducting experiments. PHOTO: ANEEL KARIM
“One of the abandoned wells that I was sampling, its surrounding soil was covered in oil, and a farmer was nearby picking his pawpaw,” recalls Ramdass.
In these fairly remote areas, residents have been living alongside the worsening pollution. She noticed people living on the beach in areas near coastal spills, with their children playing in what is most likely contaminated sand. When she spoke to people in some of the areas, she says that some mentioned health issues like trouble breathing, coughing and chest pains, but she was taken aback by their response.
“They always say that they make formal complaints and nothing is ever done… what struck me was the level of reoccurrence, almost as if they are accustomed to this.”
It made Ramdass even more determined to ensure that her work could have an impact on communities like these.
“My mentors and other advisors always said… ‘You’re not just doing academic work. Make sure it can actually be applied to help the community somehow’”, she says, and she has taken those words to heart. “We must all do our part, big or small. Everything you do has an impact, no matter what it is.”
For countries like Trinidad, with a relationship with oil that has had both a substantial economic and environmental impact, this work is crucial.
“Innovation is key to addressing oil pollution in Trinidad,” says Ramdass, “offering new technologies and solutions that improve clean-up, prevention, and ecosystem restoration, and ensuring more effective, scalable responses to environmental challenges and long-term sustainability.”
But oil is not the only environmental pollutant that this research can be useful for. “It’s not only crude oil that can be degraded, but other chemicals from industry as well,” she notes. As crude oil is such a harsh environment to exist in, microbes that thrive there are also likely to be valuable for breaking down other types of pollutants. “So, we did biochemical tests to identify enzymes, and potentially what other chemicals they could break down.”
It’s not a one-size-fits-all situation, and each environment has its own microbes adapted to work best under those conditions. The process of collecting, testing, isolating genes and the relevant enzymes can be long, and limited by funding. But once you isolate exactly what works best for what environment, the funding issue goes another way entirely.
“What you can do is extract, purify enzymes and market them… the microbial enzyme industry is a US billion-dollar market,” says Ramdass.
Her goal of commercialisation led to her winning the 2024 Appropriate Technologies competition, which is organised by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in collaboration with the Trinidad and Tobago Intellectual Property Office (TTIPO), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) and The UWI’s own StACIE. She went through the entire process of learning the business side of her research, with the goal of patenting and commercialising.
“I learnt that it’s possible to do, it just takes time, and it takes money and expertise.”
Some of her work has already been published, with further publications underway, and she has plans to continue her research as well as encouraging other students to do the same.
“Another student could carry it on and do field experiments, because it’s important to see how the microbes work in specific areas.”
Her advice to fellow hopeful students, both undergrad and postgrad, is “take the time to celebrate wins, no matter how big or small.”
Because sometimes, as her work has taught her, the little things can be the most valuable of all.
