렌즈프리 새도우 이미징 플랫폼(Navicell)을 이용한 미세조류의 생태 독성 평가

Abstract

Ecotoxicological assessment is a crucial process to understand the biological harmfulness of hazardous substances by using invertebrate, microalgae, fish, or luminescent bacteria living in the water. The ecotoxicological assessment using microalgae, i.e., algal growth inhibition toxicity test, has been conducted manually by observing the change of microalgae population using a microscope with a counting chamber, e.g., Sedgewick Rafter (SR) chamber, up to 72 h in general. However, this conventional manual method is time and labor intensive and has the subjective error by the measurer. In this study, we introduce an automatic microalgae counting device, the Navicell (see Fig. 1), that can dramatically save time and labor without loosing counting accuracy for algal growth inhibition toxicity test. Furthermore, small variation of single microalgae viability could be successfully quantified by shadow parameters in the Navicell.