DNA technology are helping to overcome water pollution

EnviroGene’s services and DNA technology are helping to overcome the issues posed when dealing with water pollution in the face of increasing regulatory-driven demand to cut direct costs, prevent unnecessary spending and achieve performance targets.

EnviroTrace DNA-based tracers map water flow from multiple geographic sources to establish relative contributions of pollution from each source. Because they are based on DNA technology it is possible to produce a large number of unique tracers, enabling the mapping of even the most complex water systems simultaneously (i.e. under the same environmental conditions).

EnviroTrace is suitable for a number of different applications including:

• Faecal pollution source identification
• Sewer leakage studies
• Groundwater flow
• Potable water connectivity studies
• Generation, amendment and validation of environmental flow models

EnviroGene’s nanoparticle EnviroTrace tracers utilise novel biocompatible (minimal toxicity) polymer technology co-developed with the University of Nottingham and the University of Milan.Essentially, EnviroTrace consists of two components: Using DNA allows us to make unique sequence tags and also makes the particles easy to detect at low levels, using qPCR.  However, DNA on its own is unstable in the environment. The polymer packaging gives the particles higher stability, with a half-life of around 16 days in surface water.

http://www.envirogene.co.uk/index.php/envirotrace