Biosensors and user-friendly diagnostic tools for environmental services

The scope covers the development of high-resolution biosensors for environmental monitoring and detection. The focus is on:

• (1) large scale synthesis of biosensor variants, across kingdoms (from bacteria/archaea to plants);
• (2) improved biosensor/genetic circuit designs for a multitude of sensor inputs, integrating modified microorganism (elements) with transduction/detection systems enabling to relay the information to the user, while guaranteeing environmental safety, especially related to any risk of potential release of such microorganisms into open environment, if relevant;
• (3) develop protein-based (RNA) biosensors to detect and measure metabolites and organisms of interest;
• (4) create organisms that can act as multiplexing sensors capable of canalizing multiple environmental cues and providing measurable responses or combination of responses that may be deconvoluted to determine stimuli, while guaranteeing environmental safety, especially related to any risk of potential release of such organisms into open environment;
• (5) build more extensive and fully-sequenced metagenomics databases/libraries to enable searches for diverse functionalities across multiple gene clusters; and
• (6) better enable real-time data feeds.

The end-users targeted include consumers but also inspection services and the industry operators, as well as environmental emergency responders. Communication and inclusive participation form an essential part of the proposals. All environmental conditions and ecosystems (water, soil, air etc), may be covered.

Concrete efforts shall be made to ensure that the data produced in the context of this project is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable), particularly in the context of real-time data feeds, exploring workflows that can provide “FAIR-by-design” data, i.e. data that is FAIR from its generation. Projects shall further build on, and widen, the data availability in European Research Infrastructures federated under the European Open Science Cloud.

To respect the ‘Do-No-Significant-Harm’ (DNSH) principle, proposals using any alive organisms need to properly assess and exclude any potential risk of their release to open environment.

The projects funded under this topic may:

• build links with the European Mission ‘Restore our ocean and waters by 2030’ or Soil Mission, in particular as regards stepping up the monitoring of ecosystems and their biodiversity;
• build links with Missions implementation monitoring system;
• build links and support the Missions knowledge and information system, in particular by contributing to pollution monitoring, modelling and knowledge creation and data.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.

Proposals should include a dedicated task, appropriate resources and a plan on how they will collaborate with other projects funded under this topic and other relevant topics.