Friday, April 29, 2016

Water quality monitoring of tomorrow - A tools vision

Current water quality monitoring relies mainly on chemical analytics to monitor occurence of a few fistful of priority compounds. This bears a great risk of missing new and emerging pollutants. To account for these the EU-FP7 SOLUTIONS project aims at developing, establishing and recommending (novel) analytical tools, that would be able to identify and also assess yet unknown substances in the aquatic environment.

Our three-pronged approach is to heavily improve target and non-target chemcial analytics, build a strong array of highly sophisticated bioanalytical test systems - i.e. effect-based tools - and further establish effect-directed analysis as a method to reliably identify drivers of toxicity. This whole vision was published in Science of the Total Environment as "Future water quality monitoring — Adapting tools to deal with mixtures of pollutants in water resource management" (fulltext access only through subscription, sorry...).