DNA-based tools could be game changer in water monitoring
Water quality is essential for our well-being. The state of aquatic ecosystems such as rivers, lakes and coastal waters directly impacts human health, societal development and economic growth. Our very existence, after all, depends on accessing clean drinking water. Over the past few decades, economic and industrial growth have placed great stress on our water resources, and led to a general decline in water quality. Evaluating the impact of human activities on aquatic ecosystems is a critical step in being able to put in place effective protection and remediation measures.
Next-generation monitoring tools
Traditional evaluation methods however – surveying and inventorying biodiversity, taking samples and identifying organisms – can be destructive to the environment. Current procedures also tend to be laborious, expensive and slow. “This is why DNA-based identification tools could be a real game changer in the field of biomonitoring,” notes AquaGen project coordinator Alina Pawlowska from ID-Gene Ecodiagnostics, Switzerland. “These tools make the detection of target species and the inventorying of biodiversity simpler, faster and less expensive. For example, it is now possible to identify all fish species living in a lake just by analysing DNA isolated from a few litres of water.” To reach the full potential of DNA-based technology in environmental monitoring, Pawlowska and her team realised that these tools needed to be fully accessible and understandable for environmental managers in the field. The AquaGen project aims to achieve this by bringing to market a user-friendly web-based platform. This platform will combine environmental genomics and machine learning technologies, to predict the ecological status of aquatic ecosystems from very small samples. “The project was inspired by discussions with environmental managers,” explains Pawlowska. “These people were clearly very interested in using new genomic tools, but were put off by their complexity. We therefore wanted to build a platform that was user-friendly and designed in a way that would make results easy to interpret.”
A future green technology
A key aim of the 4-month EU-funded project was to evaluate the feasibility of the AquaGen platform, from a both technical and commercial point of view. “The technological aspects were discussed with several IT companies,” adds Pawlowska. “This resulted in a technical specification that estimated costs, defined a timeline and identified potential service providers.” On the commercialisation side, the project facilitated the organisation of several workshops and coaching sessions. These enabled the firm to identify the software as a service (SaaS) model as the best commercial strategy. This model is associated with regular, ongoing payments, in exchange for the use of an application. “Our feasibility studies also showed that building the AquaGen platform was not only possible, but would not be excessively expensive,” says Pawlowska. “There is increasing demand for innovative environmental impact assessment tools.” The studies also underlined the importance of new DNA-based technologies being adopted within European environmental regulations. “We firmly believe that genomic tools are ideally placed to be the green technology of choice for monitoring European aquatic ecosystems,” she adds. “Given growing societal interest in environmental health, biodiversity and sustainable development, these tools will become essential elements of environmental biomonitoring in the future. Pioneering projects such as AquaGen will be at the forefront of the emerging market for DNA-based biomonitoring.”
Keywords
AquaGen, ID-Gene, water, DNA, biomonitoring, biodiversity, aquatic, ecosystem, environmental
