Centre opening in 2011 will study how bacteria can be put to good use
Grace Chua, Straits Times 11 Feb 10;
BIOFILMS - the subject of Singapore's fifth research centre of excellence - are everywhere and people do not even know about them.
These communities of bacteria range from dental plaque on teeth to the slime that clogs water pipes and fouls ships' hulls.
If researchers understand how the build-ups of bacteria live, grow and 'talk' to one another by chemical signals, they can engineer ways to prevent biofilms from forming, or harness them to do dirty work like cleaning up oil spills.
Yesterday, the National Research Foundation (NRF) announced that Singapore was spending $210 million on a centre to study the slippery subject.
The centre, a collaboration between the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the National University of Singapore, is getting $120 million from the NRF and the Ministry of Education over 10 years, and another $90 million from the two universities.
The Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering will be the world's largest such centre when it opens in January next year at NTU.
It will be headed by Professor Staffan Kjelleberg, a Swede who now directs a similar centre at the University of New South Wales in Australia, with Professor Yehuda Cohen, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as deputy director.
Both men will leave their current posts for their new ones when the time comes.
As a start, the centre will study biofilms for cleaning up pollutants or contaminants, as well as for use in wastewater treatment and in getting rid of unwanted bacterial growth on water- treatment membranes.
Now, frequent cleaning - either physical or with chemicals - is needed to scrub bacteria off water-treatment membranes, said NTU professor Ng Wun Jern, executive director of the Nanyang Environment and Water Research Institute.
'We thought, 'Wouldn't it be nice if we could talk the bacteria out of (forming a film) instead of (us) killing them?',' he said.
Later, the study of biofilm growth and signalling could have similar medical applications, such as keeping implanted catheters free of bacteria.
The centre also plans to develop an international biofilm database of research data, train a hundred graduate students and 40 post-doctoral researchers in the next 10 years, and hire more than 20 faculty members.
There is also potential for commercial applications in the water, environmental and other industries, said Prof Kjelleberg.
Singapore's four other research centres of excellence range from those dealing with earth sciences to cancer. All the centres draw their funding from a $750 million government kitty, and from other sources such as universities and grants.
They are picked for their potential to become top-ranked international institutes in 10 years or so, said Mr Teo Ming Kian, permanent secretary for national research and development in the Prime Minister's Office.
