Abstract
Aquatic toxicity testing in environmental monitoring and chemical risk assessment is critical to assess water quality for human use as well as predict impact of pollutants on ecosystems. In recent years, studies have increasingly focused on the relevance of sub-lethal effects of environmental contaminants. Sub-lethal toxicity endpoints such as behavioural responses are highly integrative and have distinct benefits for assessing water quality because they occur rapidly and thus can be used to sense the presence of toxicants. Our work describes a Lab-on-a-Chip system for the automated analysis of freshwater cladoceran Daphnia magna locomotory responses to water-born toxicants. The design combines a Lab-on-a-Chip system for Daphnia sp. culture under perfusion with time-resolved videomicroscopy and software tracking locomotory activity of multiple specimens. The application of the system to analyse the swimming behaviour of water fleas exposed to different concentrations of water-born toxicants demonstrated that Lab-on-a-Chip devices can become important research tools for behavioural ecotoxicology and water quality biomonitoring.
Highlights
Maintaining clean water resources is critical for the integrity of environment and for sustainable supply of water that is safe and suitable for drinking and agricultural use
It was designed to facilitate on chip biotests on D. magna, a freshwater cladoceran extensively used in standard ecotoxicity testing due to its high sensitivity to chemical contaminants, easy handling and culturing[6,28,29]
Aquatic toxicity biotests performed on small sentinel organisms are commonly employed in water quality assessment to meet country-specific regulatory standards
Summary
Maintaining clean water resources is critical for the integrity of environment and for sustainable supply of water that is safe and suitable for drinking and agricultural use. Apart from chemical analysis, commonly employed acute toxicity biotests are carried out by checking organisms’ survival at pre-defined time intervals (i.e. 24, 48 or 72 h) and estimating median lethal concentrations (LC50) of the target chemical or chemical mixtures[1] Such bioassays based solely on survival endpoints are time-consuming and provide no kinetic information about the toxicological effects of chemicals[2]. Behavioural responses reportedly precede mortality and are gradually gaining acceptance as sensitive endpoints of acute and sub-lethal stress[3,4,5] They can offer valuable information about the toxic effects of contaminants at environmentally relevant concentrations[5,6,7,8,9]. Contamination generate an alarm, forming the starting point of a decision and action tree for further analytical and remedial responses[5,14,15]
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