WELCOME TO THE
ARE+ LAB
The long-term goal of my research program is to enable the proactive management and development of water monitoring tools through a comprehensive understanding of the microbial ecology of wastewater and aquatic environments in Canada for improved aquatic ecosystem health.
We are located in the Department of Microbiology, University of Manitoba.
Research Interests
Our overall research encompasses four foci, which are summarized in the following lines:
- Understanding the diversity of environmental microbiomes in different impacted aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems (agriculture, urban or mixed influenced, and protected) by using next-generation sequencing tools to characterize, analyze and compare microbial fingerprints.
- Determining novel indicators for water quality and microbial source tracking using function and sequence-based metagenomics.
- Using state-of-the-art tools to characterize significant changes in microbial community as direct discharges from wastewater treatment plants or concentrated animal feeding operations that may result in the contamination of coastal and freshwater ecosystems.
- Exploring antibiotic resistance genes and the resistome in aquatic ecosystems under high and low levels of anthropogenic influence using metagenomics and their correlation with micropollutants (antibiotics and heavy metals) in the environment.
Publications
[*denotes HQP, ~denotes co-first authorship, ^ denotes Corresponding author]
• Jankowski, P.*, Gan, J.*, Le, T.*, McKennitt, M., Garcia, A.*, Yanaç, K.*, Yuan, Q., & Uyaguari-Diaz, M.^. 2022. Metagenomic community composition and resistome analysis in a full-scale cold climate wastewater treatment plant. Environmental Microbiome, 17(1), 3. doi:10.1186/s40793-022-00398-1.
• Garcia, A.~*, Le, T.~*, Jankowski, P.*, Yanaç, K.*, Yuan, Q., & Uyaguari-Díaz, M.^ Quantification of human enteric viruses as alternative indicators of fecal pollution to evaluate wastewater treatment processes. 2022. PeerJ. Available at: 10.7717/peerj.12957
• Yanaç, K.*, Adegoke, A., Wang, L., Uyaguari, M., & Yuan, Q. 2022. Detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA throughout wastewater treatment plants and a modeling approach to understand COVID-19 infection dynamics in Winnipeg, Canada. Science of the Total Environment. Available at: DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.153906