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The
project is finalised to the introduction of a new technique for
water quality monitoring, able to substantially improve the
knowledge of environmental conditions .
The
innovative principle is the use as sensors of living organisms and
the real-time check of their functional conditions by a non-invasive
technique. In fact it implies the measurement of the ultra-weak
delayed photoluminescence parameters, that are sensible indicators
of the biological system functional status.
The
living organisms are unicellular algae, the photoluminescence of
which is influenced by the quality of the liquid in the solution
where they live. The status of the biological system is detected by
a transducer and transformed in an electromagnetic signal, further
elaborated and analysed by standard techniques.
The
technique appears promising as it is strongly a-specific, i.e. it
responds to a large range of possible contaminants, allowing a quick
quality control. Moreover, using some typical indexes related to the
luminescence decay curve parameters, it gives information on several
types of possible contaminants, orienting the analyst's further work
towards the determination of single contaminant concentrations by
classical methods. |
Preliminary
work show that delayed luminescence emitted from microalgae is
influenced by the presence of weed killers, as atrazine, and
heavy metals in their culture medium.
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