Ricerc@Sapienza

The presence of cyanobacteria and their toxins in water used as drinking water or for recreational purposes may represent a risk for human health. This work describes the development of an advanced analytical method for simultaneous determination of 21 cyanotoxins (including Microcystins, Cyanopeptolins, Anabaenopeptins and Microginins) in drinking water based on Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography coupled with a Q-TOF mass spectrometer.

Concentrations of trace elements in drinking water affect its safety and acceptability for use. Potentially toxic element (PTE) contaminations are considered extremely hazardous because of toxicity, persistence, and bioaccumulative behaviour. Many areas in the Southern African Development Community are data poor and have poor accessibility. The results of our previous research identified the presence of fossil waters in southern Limpopo National Park. Groundwater and river water are the only sources of drinking water for the villages in the study area.

An innovative approach, based on HyperSpectral Imaging (HSI), was developed in order to set up an efficient method to analyze marine microplastic litter. HSI was applied to samples collected by surface-trawling plankton nets from several parts of the world (i.e. Arctic, Mediterranean, South Atlantic and North Pacific). Reliable information on abundance, size, shape and polymer type for the whole ensemble of plastic particles in each sample was retrieved from single hyperspectral images.

Despite a vast amount of literature has focused on trace element (TE) contamination in Antarctica during the last decades, the assessment of the main pathways driving TE transfer to the biota is still an overlooked issue. This limits the ability to predict how variations in sea-ice dynamics and productivity due to climate change will affect TE allocation in the food web.

The dynamic and hierarchical structure of rivers, together with disruption of the natural river continuum by human activities, makes it difficult to identify and locate sources of nutrient pollution affecting receiving waters and observe its dispersion, thus impairing monitoring efforts. The identification of reliable indicators of anthropogenic nitrogen inputs in catchments is therefore key to achieving effective management of polluted rivers.