Featured News
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Lam Lab visits Argentina to preview largest ever commercial project to clean wastewater with duckweed
The Argentine social company MamaGrande recently received $5 million USD to convert 150 ha of wastewater treatment ponds in Salta and Tucumán, northwestern provinces of Argentina, into duckweed farms (read the full press release). In February 2015, members of the Lam Lab—Philomena Chu, Kenneth Acosta, Sarah Pfaff, Ryan Gutierrez and Eric Lam—toured a couple of these sites as well as MamaGrande's ongoing pilot project in Totoras. The visit also included discussions with officials from Aguas del Norte, the water utility company of Salta and key partner of MamaGrande, and with researchers from INDEAR, an institute based in Rosario offering technological and scientific support to the project. MamaGrande aims to clean wastewater using duckweed lagoons, harvest the accumulated starch within plants for bioplastics, and generate dozens of local jobs. View a photo album of the trip.
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DNA-based approach for identifying duckweed species is published in Plant Biology
There are 37 different species of duckweed plants, and many of them are difficult to tell apart. Members of the Lam Lab, including Philomena Chu, Ryan Gutierrez, Kenneth Acosta and Eric Lam, expand on previous efforts to identify duckweed species using molecular tools. Their research article "Assessment, validation and deployment strategy of a two-barcode protocol for facile genotyping of duckweed species" appears in the January 2015 Special Issue of Plant Biology dedicated to duckweed research and applications.
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