Transcript Slide 1
MARIVMICCOLL Investigation of priority hazardous substances in the Maros River: establishment of a microbial culture collection for bioaugmentation purposes Background: Objectives: The Water Framework Directive (WFD) established a legal framework to guarantee sufficient quantities of good quality water across Europe. Its key aims are to expand water protection to all waters: inland and coastal surface waters and groundwater, to achieve "good status" for all waters by 2015, to base water management on river basins, to combine emission limit values with environmental quality standards, to ensure that water prices provide adequate incentives for water users to use water resources efficiently, to involve citizens more closely to streamline legislation. The current status of EU waters is worse than expected. Most Member States which are part of an international river basin district have put in place the necessary agreements and coordination arrangements. In all cases, data gaps need to be filled in order to provide a solid basis for the river basin management plans. The aim of this project is to investigate the quality of the water of the Maros River at both sides of the border at at least ten sampling places. In addition to the compounds presented on the list of EU Water Framework Directive regarding to the priority pollutants in surface waters, those pollutants will also be measured that are problematic in the region in the water of Maros. The project also aims to establish a special pollutant-degrading microbial strain collection. Project partners: Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Science and Informatics, University of Szeged Közép fasor 52., H-6726 Szeged, Hungary Contact: Prof. Dr. Csaba Vágvölgyi E mail: [email protected] Banat University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Timişoara Calea Aradului 119, Timişoara, Romania Contact: Conf. Dr. Lucian Dumitru Niţa E-mail: [email protected] ATI_VIZIG Stefánia 4., H-6720 Szeged, Hungary Contact: Lívia Vidács E-mail: [email protected] Project activities: www.huro-cbc.eu www.hungary-romania-cbc.eu The amount of the so called priority pollutants (correspondingly to the new EU Water Framework Directive) will be determined in the surface part of the water body. We will explore the tendencies how the abundance of these important compounds and elements depends on the actual season (spring, summer, autumn, winter) within a year. We will investigate the bacterial and fungal diversity of the river, how it changes in time and how diverse is the species ratio of that type of organisms which are able to degrade or detoxify these pollutants. The genotoxicity of water samples will also be observed with modern methods like Ames test and SOS chromotest. From the measurements an electronic database will be constructed and presented on the website of the project. Bacterial and fungal diversity will be investigated in the water samples by a modern molecular diversity determination method: RISA. The specific pollutant degraders will be identified with PCR technique using specific primer pairs which target important pollutant-catabolic plasmids or chromosomally located genes which take part in the degradation process. The diversity of degraders in some cases will be followed by culturing on specific detection media. The diversity of some catabolic genes in the bacterial communities will be followed with the community-RFLP method. Impact of the project: The important R+D character of our project is that the best pollutant-degrading microbes will be isolated, characterized and a special pollutant-degrading strain collection will be established. With the use of the strains deposited in this collection, bioaugmentation and bioremediation products and technologies could be developed in the future. The content of this document does not necessarily represent the official position of the European Union.