MARIVMICCOLL
Investigation of priority hazardous substances in the Maros
River: establishment of a microbial culture collection for
bioaugmentation purposes
Project partners:
Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Science and Informatics, University
of Szeged, Hungary
Banat University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine
Timişoara, Romania
Directorate for Water Management of Lower Tisza District (ATI-VIZIG),
Szeged, Hungary
Project implementation period: 01. 01. 2012. – 31. 12. 2013.
Background
The Water Framework Directive (WFD) established a legal framework to guarantee sufficient
quantities of good quality water across Europe. Its key aims are to expand water protection to all
waters: inland and coastal surface waters and groundwater, to achieve "good status" for all
waters by 2015, to base water management on river basins, to combine emission limit values
with environmental quality standards, to ensure that water prices provide adequate incentives
for water users to use water resources efficiently, to involve citizens more closely to streamline
legislation. The current status of EU waters is worse than expected. The actual percentage of
water bodies meeting all the WFD objectives is low, in some Member States as low as 1%. High
“at risk” numbers are clearly associated with densely populated areas and regions of intensive,
often unsustainable water use. Furthermore, the WFD comprehensively considers all pressures
and impacts on water for the first time at Community level, including problems caused by
structural degradation of ecosystems and impacts on biological parameters. The European
Community adopted Directive 91/271/EEC on urban waste water treatment in order to regulate
discharges of municipal wastewater from larger villages, towns and cities. The Directive explicitly
specifies the kind of treatment to be provided. In the EU-15, significant amounts of wastewater
are still not being treated adequately before discharge into surface waters. As the status on 1
January 2003 shows, only 81% implementation of the Directive has been reported by the
Member States. Diffuse pollution of agricultural origin is a major threat for EU water. In some
cases point source pollution is also an important problem. The main driving forces behind these
pressures are industry, households, agriculture, navigation, hydropower, flood protection and
urban development. Most Member States which are part of an international river basin district
have put in place the necessary agreements and coordination arrangements. In all cases, data
gaps need to be filled in order to provide a solid basis for the river basin management plans.
Objectives of the project
The aim of this project is to investigate the quality of the water of the Maros River at both
sides of the border at ten sampling places. In addition to the compounds presented on the list of
EU Water Framework Directive regarding to the priority pollutants in surface waters, those
pollutants will also be measured that are problematic in the region in the water of Maros. The
project also aims to establish a special pollutant-degrading microbial strain collection.
Description of the project activities
First of all the amount of the so called priority pollutants (correspondingly to the new EU
Water Framework Directive) will be determined in the surface part of the water body. We will
explore the tendencies how the abundance of these important compounds and elements
depends on the actual season (spring, summer, autumn, winter) within a year. We will
investigate the bacterial and fungal diversity of the river, how it changes in time and how diverse
is the species ratio of that type of organisms which are able to degrade or detoxify these
pollutants. The genotoxicity of water samples will also be observed with modern methods like
Ames test and SOS chromotest. From the measurements an electronic database will be
constructed and presented on the website of the project.
Bacterial and fungal diversity will be investigated in the water samples by a modern molecular
diversity determination method: RISA. The specific pollutant degraders will be identified with PCR
technique using specific primer pairs which target important pollutant-catabolic plasmids or
chromosomally located genes which take part in the degradation process. The diversity of
degraders in some cases will be followed by culturing on specific detection media. The diversity
of some catabolic genes in the bacterial communities will be followed with the community-RFLP
method.
Impact of the project
The important R+D character of our project is that the best pollutant-degrading microbes will
be isolated, characterized and a special pollutant-degrading strain collection will be established.
With the use of the strains deposited in this collection, bioaugmentation and bioremediation
products and technologies could be developed in the future.
www.huro-cbc.eu, www.hungary-romania-cbc.eu
The content of this document does not necessarily represent the official position of the European Union.