Objective
This proposal was prepared with the help of a 5-month long exploratory award. T he exploratory award covered a research feasibility study as well as novelty ve rification, economic assessment, partner search and the worprogramme definition . The project addresses the need for improved marine ecotoxicity assays. These are required for better ecological risk assessment in relation to discharge of chemicals into the marine environment and to ensure compliance with existing an d forthcoming national and European directives on marine water quality. There i s a recognised need for improved bioassays that are more informative, more accu rate, cheap and faster than existing assay systems. This project addresses all of these needs. The project is innovative in developing the use of multiple strains of marine bacteria to detect ecotoxicological effects of potential poll utants and in the development of sophisticated software tools to interpret the complex but informative data that will result. The assay will be based on micro plates for ease of use. Its ecological relevance will be ensured by using strai ns of marine bacteria and by choosing informative responses to pollutants. The assay will be constructed by choosing the most suitable strains of bacteria bot h in terms of their practical use and in terms of the biodiversity they represe nt. Next the responses of the bacteria to model pollutants will be determined a nd the best ecotoxicological indicator chosen. At the same time the software fo r gathering and interpreting the bacterial response data will be developed. Thi s will use state of the art multidimensional pattern analysis to produce respon se shapes that will be used to determine the comparative toxicity of complex mixtures and to move towards a better understanding of the components of toxici ty within such complex mixtures. The assay will then be evaluated and refined b y end users. The risk level in the project is moderate. The feasibility stud y and previous work has demonstrated the validity of using bacteria for ecotoxi cological testing and the practicalities of at least some of the aspects of the project. Economic analysis suggests a retum on intitial investment of less tha n a year after the implementation of commercial exploitation. This is on the ba sis of marketing the assay for marine use only but further return is possible b y diversifying the use of the assay.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencespublic health
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologybacteriology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental scienceshydrology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
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