Do you hate cleaning your room? Fret not, your cleaning your room isn’t half as bad as what our friend called Rhizobium has to clean up. They have a more dangerous space to clean up and that’s toxic chemicals in the environment. This article explains where Rhizobium comes from and it’s benefits to the environment. Also included in the site are different photos of how Rhizobium bacteria looks like under the microscope. For you kids, you can also view how they look like first hand by using a kind of microscope called the kid microscope.
According to the article, Rhizobium, which are the like the cleaning agents of scientists live in alfalfa and soybean roots. To understand more about this, you can have a closer look of these alfalfa and soybean roots using your kid microscope. The helpful microbes found here supply plants with nitrogen and keep the soil fertile and healthy.
In the article, the process of how Rhizobium bacteria cleans contaminated soil is also explained. First of all they need give microbes instructions, and this can be done by a certain type of gene in which instructs the bacteria how to make and secrete a certain type of enzyme from its cell walls. Once these enzymes are secreted they can clean up the chemical toxins found in soil. One chemical stated in this article is TNT or toluene which can be found in fuel and dyes. You can further explore these enzymes by looking at them under a kid microscope.
If you are a kid who likes to watch all those cartons on TV, you might be a bit familiar with TNT, since usually bombs or explosives on those shows are marked as TNT. The difficult thing about this though is that once these explosives detonate, their basic chemical building blocks get left behind in the soil or even in the water. Soil and water can be studied closer with the use of a kid micrscope. This is where the bacteria’s enzymes come in since they breakdown these TNT building blocks into harmless substances. According to scientists in this article, these enzymes can also breakdown DNT, which is found in plastic and Styrofoam.
The good thing about this bacteria is that you just put them there (like in landfills) they just sit there and  don’t degrade that easily. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have been looking for a cost- efficient way of cleaning harmful chemicals left behind in the soil since it is usually in their sites where building blocks of TNT get left behind due to their constant use of explosives in their area. They also wanted something that would not add more harm to the environment, and in this case they had turned to the use of Rhizobium.
The scientists in this article suggested coating alfalfa seeds with these bacteria and planting them in the dangerous sites. We could benefit easily from this because it would mean less effort and costs from truckers to move the polluted soil to a different location to get treated plus it would mean less exposure to a fewer number of humans making the whole procedure safer. You can do your own research by looking at alfalfa seeds under a kid microscope.
The last concern pointed out in the article though is the question whether the Rhizobium bacteria is the answer to all our problems on waste. According to the scientist in this article, Rhizobium may not totally annihilate it but contribute only a partial degradation to the problem. To those who hate cleaning, I believe this is already good news.
The scientists working on Rhizobium mentioned in this article are Gail Hollowell who helped ARS and Howard University study the bacteria; and scientists Fawzy Hashem and Bill Gillette, as well the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.