Download ecotoxicology

ECOTOXICOLOGY
Monitoring the environmental impacts of existing and new technologies is
becoming an integral part of manufacturing. Scion offers unique equipment to
support risk assessment relating to industrial discharges.
Flow cytometer
Scion offers flow cytometer services to
investigate ecosystem health via a number of
methods and species.
The flow cytometer is used to accurately quantify, sort
and characterise blood cells and phytoplankton, as an
ecotoxicological tool.
It can be used to:
•
Discriminate between discreet particles (cells) in
mixed populations, optimally ~ 106 particles/ml.
•
Perform cell counts at up to 60,000/sec.
•
Sort four populations simultaneously into tubes,
slides and 96-well plates at 98% accuracy.
•
Remove the need for manual counting techniques.
•
Identify, quantify and isolate specific-interest cells
when used in conjunction with fluorescent in situ
hybridisation (FISH).
www.scionresearch.com/services
Monitoring environmental health
Environmental health in water, soil and aquatic
environments can be assessed by analysing the number
and condition of immune cells in indicator organisms
(sentinel species), bacteria and viruses. Earthworms are
often used as an indicator of toxicity.
The flow cytometer enables these analyses.
Examples of our work
Analysing impacts of biowastes
Scion has used the flow cytometer for the following
applications.
Testing bioabsorption of heavy metals
Biowastes applied to land have valuable fertilising and
soil conditioning properties. Concerns have been raised
about microbial and chemical contaminants (such as
pharmaceuticals and hormone disruptors) within wastes.
Biorefinery process water is normally highly recycled.
Non-process contaminants such as zinc and manganese
can accumulate. Flow cytometry has been used to test
absorption of accumulated metals by bacteria, yeast and
fungi.
Scion has used flow cytometry to analyse immune cells
in earthworms (pictured below) as sentinel species to
understand public health, environmental and economic
risks (immune cell from earthworm pictured below). The
impacts of environmental contaminants are measured by
counting and comparing specific types of immune cells in
this species.
Testing toxicity using algal species
Flow cytometry has been used to test the toxicity of
effluents from industry. Pictured above is an algal species
used to test for toxicity of industrial effluent. Toxicity is
indicated by measuring growth inhibition of this indicator
species.
www.scionresearch.com/services
January 2013
CONTACT
Marie Dennis
[email protected]
+64 7 343 5899
www.scionresearch.com