The use of bacteria to aid the clean-up of contaminated soil is an area that has current applications at heavy metal and radionuclide dump sites. The bacteria's role in cleaning up the sites is not to remove the contamination, rather render it immobile by reacting with chemicals and changing its oxidation state. In order for that to occur, most sites with radionuclides also have high levels of heavy metals. Therefore it is important for these bacteria to have a resistance to heavy metals. The bacteria, CH34 and FRC, that will be looked at are known to have a Ni resistance, and the goal is to better understand the Ni compounds the bacteria form when Ni is present in their environment.

The current plan is to utilize the scanning transmission X-ray microscope (STXM) at beam line X1A at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory to look at the two different bacteria at their stationary phase and their growth phase, with and without Ni present. The data will be collected at the Oxygen edge and the Carbon edge. The Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) at Stony Brook University will be used to provide a high resolution image of the bacteria-nickel sample. The data from the STXM and will be analyzed by cluster analysis.