Smart wired: intelligence for the protection of the environment

In each millilitre of drinking water, mind you: not in the effluent, one can find, depending on the water line, up to eighty thousand different micro-organisms. Our environment provides space for incredibly complex Ecosystems, with microscope and today, especially with subjects of thematic instruments open up.

Joachim Müller-Jung

editor in the features section, responsible for the area of “nature and science”.

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In the water, useful and harmful micro-find themselves living beings, and the exact composition and quantity of the species says a lot about the quality of the water. However, the environmental monitoring by gene analyses because of the highly divergent microbial communities is severely limited. That should change now. With the combination of fast genome sequencing (“Next Generation Sequencing”), and Artificial intelligence, the Tracking of the bio-indicators now gets a new quality.

A smart mass screening of water bodies, Thorsten Stoeck, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, and researchers at the University of Geneva, in “Trends in Microbiology” in view of the samples. In the vicinity of Norwegian salmon farms has tested the procedure. It wasn’t our aim to identify all of the genetic material, but to search specifically for certain gene sequences.

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When the man with the machine intelligences in the laboratory

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a Good ninety percent of the microorganisms are entirely unknown. Rather, the genomic fingerprint of environmental samples with a reference database to be adjusted. Big Data for the water quality. Theoretically, you should be suitable of this method for the continuous monitoring of the environment, however, it has to prove itself yet thousands of environmental tests.