Another successful portable molecular diagnostics for water quality analysis workshop, this time with Sidharth Maheshwari and his team at the Indian Institute of Technology Jammu. Within one week from water sampling to millions of superhigh accuracy reads. Undergraduate and postgraduate students extracted DNA from 24 samples for next generation sequencing with the portable MinION device of Oxford Nanopore Technologies. From Newcastle University for the world.

We successfully completed a bathymetric survey of the Woolsington Parish Council pond with Dr Maria-Valasia Peppa’s drone boat. Andre Frota is researching the water cleaning potential of the pond as part of our work with UKWIR on catchments as the first stage of water treatment.

BBC Look North have covered the Ouse Burn Way initiative and our collaboration with the Reece Foundation as part of their week of stories about the state of our waters.
https://lnkd.in/g7c4kmGm

Jidapa Plaimart’s paper reports on the effective removal of iron, nutrients, micropollutants, and faecal bacteria in constructed wetlands cotreating mine water and sewage treatment plant effluent.

The Reece Foundation provides a £1 million funding boost for a bluegreen corridor called The Ouse Burn Way through Newcastle City Centre connecting communities with nature.

Our investigation of bacterial water quality in the Ouseburn has been reported in the national and local news: BBC1, BBC2, Big Issue, New Scientist, BBC Science Focus, Chronicle1, Chronicle2, ITV News Tyne and Tees and Metroradio.

Here is my advice for people wanting to safely enjoy our rivers.

Take these precautions before entering a river.

During a September storm event, 72-77% of all river bacteria in the Ouseburn originated from combined sewer overflow (CSO) discharges. Read more about this innovative and important work by my team.

Lara Urban and I feature in a webinar describing our experience with eDNA sequencing using the portable MinION of Oxford Nanopore Technologies. You can watch the webinar recording via the link embedded above.

Relaxing with my good friends Profs Yuksel Ardali and Hrissi Karapanagioti after a successful Climate Cooperation and Green Deal Symposium 2022 in Samsun at Ondokuz Mayis University. Yuksel and Hrissi visited Newcastle University with their children for a few months over 10 years ago. It goes to show the importance of face to face meetings and informal conversations, which transform professional contacts into life-long friendships.