About

The Environmental Research Initiative (ERI) provides financial support to EMBL scientists seeking to better understand and tackle environmental challenges. This is done at the moment by funding catalyst projects. In the future, we aspire towards the support of new groups, each focusing on a specific area of research linked to tackling pressing environmental challenges.

The first catalyst project we chose to fund on behalf of alumni was the EMBL Zimmermann group’s exploration of plankton as a tool to combat marine pollution. Our goal was to raise €18,500 in support of this project. We raised €160,000 through donations from 50 alumni. Thank you!

In April 2022, the alumni community raised €7,355 towards funding this project. The second phase of the campaign began in October 2022, bringing in a total of €10.340 for the year. This meant that the project could begin.

In early 2023, the project became a collaboration between the Zimmermann and Vincent labs, with postdoctoral fellow Richard Jacoby and predoctoral fellow Soraya Zwahlen recruiting and supervising a masters student, Sandra Kindler, to pilot-test innovative methods and protocols to measure how plankton respond to pollutants. Sandra helped assemble a comprehensive library of approximately 250 chemicals representing priority marine pollutants.

A further success story from this campaign was the engagement of EMBL alumni Roel and Marijke Wijnaendts, who contributed to the campaign and visited EMBL to learn how they could do more. “Plankton is the start of life, and it could also save life,” Roel pointed out during their second visit on 20th June. A week later, Roel and Marijke donated €150,000 towards ERI. This substantial donation started a chain reaction that led to the order of a plankton scanner for EMBL.

The ERI Plankton catalyst project is still in its early stages. The plankton scanner, however, will open a whole new world of possibilities for seeing plankton, and dramatically advancing research in this area. This outcome highlights the impact of many smaller donations, without which this larger gift would not have happened.

We would once again like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the EMBL community, sharing with you the thank you message from Flora Vincent and her predoctoral fellow, Thomas Beavis, sent to Roel and Marijke while they were on their fieldwork in Tallinn, Estonia.

Exploring plankton as a tool to combat marine pollution

An accumulation of pollutants in organisms caused by agriculture, industry, and pharmaceuticals is harming marine biodiversity, ecosystems and seafood.

Plankton, tiny organisms carried by tides and currents, are gatekeepers of bioaccumulation, but there is currently a knowledge gap in this area.

This project will research plankton as bioindicators rather than fish or molluscs which are typically used as marine bioindicators. Plankton have advantages compared to bigger species, because they control the first step of bioaccumulation, and because they initiate cascades that have knock-on effects on the rest of the ecosystem.

Another key point of difference in this project, compared to other environmental monitoring work, is the use of advanced technologies like sequencing and mass spectrometry. Cutting-edge analytical methods will be deployed to define specific plankton species, the toxic pollutants they absorb and the mechanisms of bioaccumulation.

This pilot will allow us to explore the potential and feasibility of using plankton to study pollutants and their fate in the environment.

This 1-year project costs €18,500 for a designated masters project plus the consumable costs used in mass spectrometry and sequencing.

Outcomes

Three catalyst projects that address pollution from pesticides, nanoplastics and artificial hormones were funded in 2021 from donations amounting to just over €60,000, thanks to the Friends of EMBL programme and generous individuals. Find out more about the outcomes of the three projects below:

1. Fighting pesticides with microbes
2. Cleaning wastewater from artificial hormones
3. Tackling plastic pollution in the oceans

1. Fighting pesticides with microbes

Pesticides used in agriculture are a major threat for soil and water ecosystems. Although it is known that microbes can break down pesticides, it is still not well understood which microbes do this and how they do it.

In the past year, this project has established a chemical library of 1033 agricultural pesticides, which is a unique resource because no pesticide library was previously commercially available.

EMBL developed analytical methods to systematically map which microbes degrade which pesticides and established protocols to monitor pesticide pollution in the field on a large-scale level.

Furthermore, this project made it possible to recruit a dedicated scientist, whose success secured an ARISE fellowship to continue working on this project until 2024.

In the future, this research will help identify ways to better remove pesticides from the environment and to design greener chemicals.

2. Cleaning wastewater from artificial hormones

The daily use of pharmaceuticals introduces a high load of artificial hormones into the wastewater and the environment, which is harmful to fish and local ecosystems. However, it is currently a major hurdle to be able to detect and identify these hormones.

In 2021, EMBL developed a preliminary computational pipeline, a series of data processing calculations that may help improve the detection of artificial hormones in wastewater. In the near future, real-world samples will be sampled from a local wastewater treatment plant and the computational pipeline will be expanded for more diverse compounds such as steroids.

This will improve the validity and performance of the computational pipeline, which is necessary to improve the detection and identification of artificial hormones.

3. Tackling plastic pollution in the oceans

Eight million tonnes of plastic waste end up in the oceans each year. This plastic waste eventually breaks down into tiny particles called microplastics and nanoplastics, which can cause serious problems for animals, humans, and ecosystems. However, the precise impacts of nanoplastics remain largely unexplored.

Combining advanced X-ray technology and biophysical techniques, EMBL scientists have successfully established a ‘tool set’, allowing them to take a closer look at the size and shape of nanoplastics. With this new information, they will be able to start analysing the behavior of nanoplastics in ‘real life samples’ such as water from the rivers, oceans and in physiological relevant solutions such as blood.

This will help them better understand what happens to nanoplastics when they enter the ocean and our bodies and the potential threats to our marine ecosystems and to human health. Key experiments are ongoing. Watch this space for outcomes.

FAQ

Donors

A huge thanks to all the donors supporting the ERI Alumni fundraising campaign, who are listed below.

Funds raised in April were supplemented by a €1,000 personal donation from Matthias Hentze, as promised during the campaign.

To view all donors supporting ERI outside this campaign please visit the ERI Donors page.

Contact

Please get in touch if you would like to find out more:
Mehrnoosh Rayner
EMBL Head of Alumni Relations
E-mail: rayner[at]embl.de
Tel: +49-6221-3878102