Climate change is having a profound and concerning effect on aquatic ecosystems, with coastal waters experiencing progressive warming, acidification, and deoxygenation, and the impacts of damaging…

Climate change is having a profound and concerning effect on aquatic ecosystems, with coastal waters experiencing progressive warming, acidification, and deoxygenation, and the impacts of damaging events such as harmful algae blooms (habs) are expected to increase over the coming century. Habs have the potential to not only drastically impact public health but also to devastate recreation, tourism, aquaculture, and the overall ecosystem. The development of a sensitive sensor platform for the continuous monitoring of water for cyanotoxins would facilitate the early detection and prediction of HAB events, enabling early action and reducing the costs, environmental damage, and economic damage commonly associated with habs. We will develop a nanobody-based biosensor strain along with a continuous biosensor platform that will be able to detect and quantify the cyanotoxin microcystin in real time. Importantly, this approach will lead to a pipeline for developing sensors for countless toxins and contaminants, as once we have demonstrated proof of principle with the development of a sensor for microcystin detection, we can swap in a new nanobodies to detect new targets of interest. Water pollution is a widespread problem that is growing in both impact and awareness, and there is an increasing need for in-line, location specific contaminant measurements to help localize problems, identify their sources, verify compliance with discharge limits, and monitor harmful events and remediation efforts. Therefore, the market for in-line contaminant sensors is multi-faceted, with potential customers in the food industry, environmental monitoring, drinking water safety, and wastewater remediation. Due to the customizable nature of our platform, we will pursue many industries as we expand our business, with a particular focus on water quality and safety testing. Importantly, our phase i project will prove technical feasibility for this novel nanobody-based sensing approach, and in phase II we will add the ability to detect additional toxins as well as refine the platform for commercial manufacturing and sales.