New autonomous technology allows to monitor aquatic microorganisms
06th June 2019
Climate changes and the runoff of nutrients and pollutants greatly affect the equilibrium of natural microbial communities and compromise the ecosystem's health like the aquatic ones, among others. In that regard, the researchers from the Centre of Marine and Environmental Research of the University of Porto (CIIMAR-UP) and from the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC) joined forces in order to develop this technology.
“The planktonic microbial communities play an important role in the response to climate changes and to anthropogenic impacts, having direct consequences in the water quality, fisheries regulation and management of the water masses. In this context, it’s essential to concentrate efforts in the research that culminates in the development of new autonomous monitoring tools of the dynamics of planktonic microbial communities”, explains the researcher of CIIMAR and leader of this project, Catarina Magalhães.
The planktonic microbial communities are crucial for several natural processes of the aquatic ecosystems, including the control of nutrient availability, degradation and recycling of anthropogenic organic and inorganic contaminants. However, the effects of climate changes and the runoff of nutrients and pollutants can promote the occurrence of pathogens or microbial toxin producers. These factors affect the equilibrium of natural microbial communities and compromise the entire ecosystem status. In this context, the improvement of the microbial plankton monitoring is essential to understand how these communities respond to environmental changes related to the effects of climate changes or to the runoff of nutrients and pollutants.
The collection of these types of samples involves, so far, expensive and time-consuming sampling procedures, which can limit the frequency of which sampling and data collection can be made. It also promotes the deterioration of the sample, thus increasing the risk of potential contamination due to the storage time. The biosampler, which was developed by biologists from CIIMAR-UP and engineers from INESC TEC, is autonomous and it’ll be able to improve the temporal and spatial resolution of biological monitoring in different aquatic environments.
Alfredo Martins, researcher from INESC TEC’s Centre for Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Professor at ISEP and also one of the people responsible for this study, indicates the advantages of the autonomous biosampler that was developed in the study: “We believe that the successful development of this prototype of autonomous sampling of aquatic microbiomes, which is the result of a multidisciplinary collaboration between INESC TEC and CIIMAR, will solve multiple limitations associated with manual collection and therefore will foster the biological monitoring on a broad temporal and spatial scale, thus reducing costs and increasing its efficiency.”
Another significant advantage of the developed biosampler is to minimise artefacts associated with sample handling, maximizing sterile conditions and enabling almost immediate preservation of the genetic material of biological samples. In addition to this, by integrating the biosampler in fixed or mobile water observation systems, it’ll be possible to substantially increase the biological monitoring ability through large-scale temporal studies of microbial communities' diversity and functions.
This prototype was developed and validated under the projects MarinEye, Coral and MarRisk.
For more information:
Joana Coelho
Communication Service
INESC TEC
FEUP’s Campus
Rua Dr Roberto Frias
4200-465 Porto
Portugal
Tel.: +351 22 209 4297
Mob.: +351 924 444 321