Marine research in Aachen - with a fresh water model organism

Oil spills in cold Baltic and Arctic Sea waters are a special challenge to investigate, and hence they are the research focus of our new EU H2020-funded collaborative project "Integrated oil spill response actions and environmental effects - GRACE". The project is coordinated by Kirsten Jörgensen of SYKE in Helsinki, Finland, and made it successfully through a two-stage process. This means that not only the initial project draft has been considered sufficiently good by a couple of reviewers, but also the then submitted full proposal received positive reviews.

In the project we strive together with our partners from Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Spain, Norway, Greenland, Sweden and Canada to comprehensively investigate the environmental impact of oil spills and provide measures for mitigation. Our part will be to establish the zebrafish as a model organism for oil spill detection and assessment. This brings a number of challenges:

1. The zebrafish is a fresh water organism. Any effects of oil constituents have to be related to marine environments, including the impact of temperature and salinity. We will make comparisons to parallel experiments with marine stickleback to calibrate our model to the Baltic and Arctic Sea.
2. We will develop a biosensor based on fish larvae behaviour that can travel on a ferry and make online measurements. The device will trigger an alert upon changes in behaviour and lead to more detailed effect-based investigations using reportergen assays.
3. By means of a broad battery of assays and together with other partners of the project we intend to derive toxicity fingerprints of oil contaminations.

I am leader of the work package on the bioanalytical investigations. Two PhD students will work on the biosensor and the zebrafish model, respectively.

The whole project aims at developing novel tools and strategies for oil spill response, and increase the knowledge on the distribution, mobility, severity, impact and possibilities for mitigation of oil contaminations.

More information can be found later on the official project website, the project webpage of our institute and several press releases.

Currently, further information is available in a press release by SYKE.

Once more I happened to design the logo.