Workshop on a multi-biosensors platform for monitoring marine pollutants | Marinebiotech

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Workshop on a multi-biosensors platform for monitoring marine pollutants

Published 26 May 2017

A multidisciplinary and multisector meeting was held by the BRAAVOO project consortium in Messina 19 and 20 May 2016. The intention of the meeting was to inform the experts in the field on the technology developed within the project and to get feedback from a diverse users community. Moreover, the workshop aimed to identify any gaps in the existing technology or its application. Invited stakeholder and end-users were selected on the basis of their commitment to the marine environment monitoring, public bodies responsible for protecting and use of marine environment, research centres and academies, private sectors. Prof. Jan Roloef van der Meer (project coordinator) described the developed technologies, after which a plenary fruitful discussion followed. The 43 participants were asked to complete a questionnaire about their interest on the proposed technologies, their vision on field application, their interest on buying single modules biosensors or whole platform and to identify the gaps for their specific needs.

Stakeholders expressed a great interest for the project. Sensitivity, miniaturization and remote monitoring are seen as an advantage compared with other solutions. One of the needs that was identified was the selectivity of single pollutants. Validation with official protocols for the analyses of the same pollutants would of course be necessary. The preferred type of environment is, e.g. the offshore application for the whole platform in case of an oil-spill. Others are the marine coastal environment, harbour dredging, monitoring following spills or supposed spills and waste-water plants.

An important issue that was pointed out concerns many of the new technologies: public bodies are required to follow approved protocols. Even European regulations are conditioned by these rules which are often obsolete, time-consuming and expensive.

Read the full workshop report by downloading the flyer.