Protecting Canada's drinking water: Developing real-time early-warning biomonitoring technology

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This proposal addresses the necessity of developing an early-warning strategy to detect potential threats todrinking water sources. Natural bodies of water that ultimately constitute some of Canada's drinking watersupply can contain a variety of pollutants such as heavy metals, PAHS, halogenated organic molecules,pharmaceuticals, pathogens, etc. While the associated health risks of some of these components are alreadyknown, there remains an alarming lack of research in many other areas. Our proposal will develop aninnovative approach to assessing the potential toxicity of waterborne contaminants before these deleteriousconstituents reach drinking-water facilities. We will use a holistic, multi organism-based system to measurestress reactions in the aquatic community and will monitor these stress responses in real-time. We will alsodevelop ecotoxicity models based on dose-responses of individual organisms to specific classes of stressors(chemical and biological). These models will aid in the interpretation of the data and will provide informationfor water-utilities managers about the nature of the stressor. Also, this knowledge will be useful in strategies tominimize risk to end-users. The ultimate goal of our proposal is the development and implementation of anearly-warning system in real-time for drinking-water facilities that would detect chemical contaminants andpathogens using biomonitoring organisms. In order to achieve this, our project will: 1) measure responses inaquatic plants and invertebrates to chemical stressors at environmentally-relevant concentrations and topathogens; 2) develop a microarray-based test that can be used to directly detect pathogenic organisms; 3) buildand test a flow-through system in a drinking-water facility for stress-response determinations in real-time; 4)develop methods of stereotyped responses for the whole suite of biomonitoring organisms to chemicalcontaminants and pathogens. These models will be used to predict the nature of contamination when responsesare observed among the organisms. These models will ultimately form the basis of the early-warning system tomonitor potential toxicity of chemical and biological agents in real-time at drinking-water facilities.