A vast viral world in wastewater

How metagenomic sequencing helps to understand the spread of viruses

22-Jul-2024 - Deep metagenomic sequencing of wastewater in Berlin over 17 months shows this technique could help forecast disease outbreaks and monitor the spread of human pathogens. It can also reveal thousands of novel viruses, according to a study by the Landthaler lab published in “Environment ...

Detect 'forever chemicals' in under 3 minutes

New lab-based method to detect traces of PFAS from food packaging material, water and soil samples

12-Feb-2024 - PFAS have earned the name “forever chemicals” with good reason — the man-made compounds, which can take thousands of years to degrade and are found in everything from grease-resistant food packaging to water-repellent clothing, have made their way into nearlyhalf the U.S. tap water supply. Now, ...

Let it glow: Scientists develop new approach to detect ‘forever chemicals’ in water

18-Jan-2024 - Scientists at the University of Birmingham in collaboration with scientists from the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM) have developed a new approach for detecting pollution from ‘forever chemicals’ in water through luminescence. PFAS or ‘forever chemicals’ are manufactured ...

Bottled water can contain hundreds of thousands of previously uncounted tiny plastic bits

A new microscopic technique zeroes in on the poorly explored world of nanoplastics, which can pass into blood, cells and your brain

11-Jan-2024 - In recent years, there has been rising concern that tiny particles known as microplastics are showing up basically everywhere on Earth, from polar ice to soil, drinking water and food. Formed when plastics break down into progressively smaller bits, these particles are being consumed by humans ...

Tracking down Environmental Toxins

Detection of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) by interrupted energy transfer

02-Nov-2023 - PFAS, a family of highly fluorinated substances, represent a danger for humans and the environment. Particularly problematic members of this family, such as perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) appear to cause organ damage and cancer, as well as disrupting the ...

A mobile breakthrough for water environment monitoring

A novel colorimetric multi-channel sensor on cell phone platform

26-Jan-2023 - Reliable colorimetric analysis technologies have been widely praised for their highly sensitive and selective responses towards various contaminants in environmental monitoring. In principle, the chromogenic agent selectively reacts with the target in water samples, and the colored product ...

Searching the sewers for viruses

"In the future, additional tools will be integrated into the pipeline that will even enable us to predict the effects of a newly discovered mutation"

14-Oct-2022 - Algorithms developed at the Max Delbrück Center are able to quickly detect new SARS-CoV-2 variants in wastewater. But that’s not all: the tool, which Altuna Akalin and his colleagues have now presented in “Science of the Total Environment”, can also find other pathogens. SARS-CoV-2 is one of many ...

Identifying toxic materials in water with machine learning

New research can quickly identify toxins from oil sands and tailing ponds

23-Mar-2022 - Waste materials from oil sands extraction, stored in tailings ponds, can pose a risk to the natural habitat and neighbouring communities when they leach into groundwater and surface ecosystems. Until now, the challenge for the oil sands industry is that the proper analysis of toxic waste ...

Wastewater provides new insight into Covid-19 dynamics

An interdisciplinary team shows that the R number of coronavirus can be estimated quickly and cost-effectively from wastewater

17-Dec-2021 - Since the start of the coronavirus (Sars-Cov-2) pandemic, many public health measures have been decided based on its dynamic of spread, more precisely, on the reproductive number of the virus, known as the R number. This value indicates how many people on average are infected by a person carrying ...

Microlab on a chip: Water please, but clean

A further developed chip prototype for water analysis devices

11-Nov-2021 - A microfluidic chip takes up a water sample, adds the necessary chemicals and transports it to the detection site. What's the point? In this way, the water is to be analyzed fully automatically and with various parameters, and at the lowest possible cost. A further developed chip prototype for ...