BioBullets To Combat Invasive Zebra Mussel
A Cambridge based company called BioBullets has developed an encapsulated poison of the same name intended to control the zebra mussel, and invasive bivalve that is clogging waterways worldwide. From a Business Weekly article:
Dr David Aldridge of the University of Cambridge’s Zoology department says that his company, BioBullets received approval to use its potassium chloride-loaded pellets in UK waterways from the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) in December 2008, which was closely followed by a £500k grant from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB).
This TSB award is being match-funded by Anglian and Thames Water together with BioBullet’s industrial partner Tastetech, a specialist in microencapsulation technology for food ingredients and natural flavourings based in Bristol, which is expected to host the new manufacturing site.
BioBullets’ initial work has focused on the problem of the small but prevalent zebra mussel, quickly becoming one of the world’s biggest environmental and ecological pests, clogging the water systems of power plants, water treatment facilities, irrigation systems and industrial water intake structures.
BioBullets says that since arriving in the North American Great Lakes in the 1980s, zebra mussels have become a major bio-fouler, blocking the raw water cooling systems of power stations and water treatment works and costing between $1-5 billion every year.
Current control methods use chlorine to rein in the pest, which not only provides its own environmental concerns, but is not entirely efficient as the mussels can sense it and other toxic substances, limiting their exposure to the chemicals by closing their valves for up to three weeks.
BioBullets overcome these problems by packing potassium chloride into micros-copic particles made of fats, a ‘Trojan horse’ technique gets the toxic compound past the mussels’ defences as they transfer the particles along their gills and into their mouths.
The particles rapidly dissolve in the animals’ stomachs releasing a lethal dose of potassium chloride.
Dr Aldridge says his group is also working on a number of other invasive species, which is bringing in international funding from three different continents.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US has awarded BioBullets a $120k (£75k) grant to develop novel formulations for invasive sea squirts, immobile marine invertebrates which extract food from seawater pumped through a branchial sac in their body cavity.