Ultrasensitive nanoplatform enabling on-site and continuous water pollutant detection based on analyte fingerprinting.

Objective

Thousands of chemical substances are currently produced by humans for various purposes with a substantial portion leaking into the environment. The European Commission has already defined the following two priorities: protecting our biodiversity and ecosystems, and reducing air, water and soil pollution within the environment and oceans actions included in the recently approved European Green Deal programme. WATERsense aims at developing a new concept and respective prototype for universal vibrational spectroscopy-based analyte fingerprinting that is performed in continuous manner and enables sensitive monitoring of analytes. To attain this main objective we will fabricate magneto-plasmonic nano-objects that will carry the analytes to be detected. These nanocarriers will flow through a micro/nanofluidic chip system where they will be trapped, docked and subsequently optically probed by Raman spectroscopy. WATERsense will target the following novel approaches: (i) Molecular Trapping: Controlled analyte (pollutant molecule) loading within the nanocarriers. (ii) Tracking and Transport: Manipulation of a single nanoparticle-carrier in a nano-sized fluidic chamber. (iii) Detection: Ultrasensitive analyte detection up to 6 orders of magnitude below the required concentration range. (iv) Analysis: Quantitative, extremely fast and continuous pollution detection and real-time analysis based on molecular fingerprinting using machine learning algorithms trained on large datasets. WATERsense technology will enable the real-time tracking of concentration changes of a set of important pollutants that represent a danger for humankind and environment, revolutionising the field of environmental protection. In the long run, the WATERsense sensing concept can also be extended to sampling in the food industry, reagent sampling in the pharmaceutical branch, detection of biomarkers for molecular diagnostics and examination of fundamental processes in hydrology, geology and biology.