SOLUTIONS post on the freshwaterblog

The SOLUTIONS project held its annual general assembly from 13 to 16 October in Delft, The Netherlands. It was a very valuable event with the cosy atmosphere of a family meeting.

We tried to capture this feeling in a blog post for the freshwaterblog, which is run by one of our partner projects - called MARS.

I enjoyed being responsible for the first draft, and hence the overall structure of the text. It is based on a personal-general scheme, for which I collected quotations from project members. This was fun, especially because I chose a slightly cybernetical approach asking my interview partners about their role in and expectations for SOLUTIONS - sometimes quite a challenge for scientists in times when the main reason for projects seems to be fundraising.

Appears to have been a good excercise for everyone. The blog post can be accessed here.

What we propose from what we learned

We were invited by Peter Chapman to write a so called Learned Discourse (LD) for the SETAC journal Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management (IEAM). LDs are described as "timely scientific opinions" and give authors the opportunity to communicate their thoughts on a specific topic. Peter is editor for LDs in IEAM. He asked us to write an LD about the Basel session, but we extended the theme to an overall review of our science communication activities. From that we derived "Three propositions for improved science communication from environmental research".

Cooperation for an effect-based investigation of municipal waste waters

Its not happening often that ecotoxicologists are asked by a municipality to investigate their sewage waters. The City of Stolberg together with Wasserverband Eifel-Rur (WVER) did, and we agreed to give 10 samples from their sewage water system a thorough ecotoxicological look, including influents and effluents from the waste water treatment plant Stolberg-Steinfurt.

This small but very interesting project will be covered by the master's thesis of candidate Sarah Johann. We will apply a range of different bioassays to reveal any possible hazardous potential.
Stolberg is a city near Aachen and an industrial hotspot of the region. While they have extensive data on heavy metal concentrations from continuous monitoring, so far no in-depth investigation of organic contamination has been done. Our bioassays are very well suited and sensitive enough to detect such substances through their biological activity.

Any positive results we will gain do not necessarily indicate a problem at all. Concentrations traceable using bioassays are often well below any environmentally or even toxicologically relevant level. Also, we do not expect any severe findings. This is a completely unbiased study, driven by scientific curiosity.

The City of Stolberg and the WVER are just very strict regarding environmental and human safety. They do so much for quality assurance when it comes to their waste waters, they now also want to cover this aspect. For us the project is a fantastic opportunity to get access to well-defined, specific waste water samples from different, very interesting spots, to better understand distribution of contaminants along the sewage water flow, and to prove bioassays as valuable tools for waste water monitoring.

Water to the power of 3 - Quality, Security and Management

The W3-Hydro project ("Water Quality Event Detection for Urban Water Security and Urban Water Management Based on Hydrotoxicological Investigations") is a BMBF-funded collaboration between RWTH Aachen University and the Technion in Haifa, Israel, within the Joint German-Israeli Water Technology Research Program. The project is coordinated by the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management (IWW) under the lead of Prof. Holger Schüttrumpf.

We aim at an early event detection, identification and management of unforeseen, negative and sudden events for drinking water supply using hydrological in combination with ecotoxicological experimental investigations, together with water management and modelling.

Our part is (a) to develop an early warning system that automatically triggers sampling and further testing based on biotest systems, and (b) to investigate contaminant behaviour in the water-sediment-system for better understanding of substance transport and distribution.

We already built a custom-made low-cost pipetting robot for the automatic sampling, and started with the development of a flow-through device for behaviour monitoring of zebrafish larvae.

Futher info on the project can be found at http://w3hydro.org/

And again, I could enjoy designing a logo.

PAHs from coals are ecotoxicologically active

In continuation of the PAHs-from-coals-story, Wiebke Meyer published additional data and findings on the toxic potential of PAHs deriving from different coal types in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

The article titled "Polar polycyclic aromatic compounds from different coal types show varying mutagenic potential, EROD induction and bioavailability depending on coal rank" reports on mutagenicity and dioxin-like activity of coal-derived PAHs. Wiebke found that the toxic properties differ between coal types, and also some are better available to organisms than others, thus might more likely cause adverse effects.

Constant dosing: reliable exposure concepts to reduce "animal" use

Passive dosing is an approach were the partitioning equilibrium of a substance between a solid and a liquid phase is utilised to maintain exposure concentrations in biotesting. This means that test organisms are exposed at defined and constant concentrations, thus reducing experimental variability and uncertainty, which leads to more robust results.

Together with Philipp Mayer and Kilian E.C. Smith, both formerly of NERI in Roskilde, Denmark, and now with Technical University of Denmark and KIST Europe, respectively, we put out a paper "PAH toxicity at aqueous solubility in the fish embryo test with Danio rerio using passive dosing" in Chemosphere reporting on the usage of PDMS cast into glass vials for passive dosing of non-hatched zebrafish embryos (FET biotest). We show for 10 PAHs constant delivery from the PDMS reservoir to the water phase based on equilibrium partitioning, and prove passive dosing applicable in FET. This test design could in future lead to better data and hence reduced use of zebrafish embryos, albeit legally fish larvae up to 120 hours post fertilization are not considered animals. But we are biologists, we care about any organism.

SOLUTIONS - a project with a consortium that solves any problem

Since one year already we are part of the EU-funded collaborative research project "Solutions for present and future emerging pollutants in land and water resources management" (SOLUTIONS). It is one of the largest environmental research projects within the EU and promises nothing less than to find a solution for all substances and mixtures in European water bodies and suggest to the EU commission how future water quality assessment should look like.

Our part in this is to better predict the influence of already existing and "emerging" pollutants through an improved understanding of the effects of environmental burdens on cells and organisms.
For further info on the project in general and the work of our group go to:

http://www.solutions-project.eu/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/SOLUTIONS/442137955889022
https://twitter.com/SOLUTIONS_UFZ
http://www.rwth-aachen.de/go/id/gufw/?lidx=1#aaaaaaaaaaagufx
http://www.aachener-zeitung.de/lokales/region/der-gesundheit-unserer-seen-auf-den-grund-gehen-1.935379 (German)

What is truely unique to the project is the composition of the consortium. The partners are coming not only from all different countries and institutions - what is common to such large endeavours - but they all feature some specific expertise that might come in handy for someone else from the project. There is much less overlap of research fields than in other joint projects, providing a vast selection of different knowledge, tools, methods, equipment, skills, capabilities and the like. Literally we can say that the solution for any problem we encounter within the project lies in the consortium and just has to be asked for. What a good condition for our water bodies.