Monitor the effectiveness of your site remediation

Not sure how well bioremediation has worked at your site, or which microbes are working?

When you’re attempting bioremediation, it’s vital to know how successful you are and if the microbes you’re relying on are doing their jobs. This information can be gathered through the practice of routine monitoring that is both cost-effective and will ensure regulator expectations are being met.

Using our unique and proven approach to monitoring, Novorem can incubate contaminated groundwater samples with stable-isotope-labelled compounds and trace the assimilation of these compounds into microbes. This allows us to identify and assess the microbes assimilating contaminants – and therefore unambiguously evidence that a biological process is in play.

How does Isotope Analysis work?

Stable isotopes can be used to understand the fate of contaminants in your site, without any environmental or safety risks.

Isotope Probing provides you with an accurate analysis – unambiguous evidence that a pollutant has been degraded biologically, and the ability to identify the organisms responsible.

The process for Isotope Analysis is as follows:

1

Novorem selects suitable samples from your contaminated site.

2

A version of the sample is incubated in the presence of a stable-isotope-labelled contamin

3

It is then determined whether there are microbes present in the sample that can assimilate the pollutant.

4

If successful, the microbes are then injected into the contaminated site.

5

Spectrometry and equilibrium density centrifugation are used to detect stable isotopes in microbial biomarkers.

6

The gathered data is used to identify the microbes which have dominated the assimilation of an isotope from a contaminant of concern.

7

 Novorem can also subcontract Compound Specific Isotope Analysis (CSIA) to investigate fractionation of natural isotope abundance. CSIA can be used to generate evidence of biodegradation for organochlorines or hydrocarbons.

Interested in finding out how Isotope Probing can work for you?

Disentangle the biological, physical and chemical processes at work on your contaminant of concern.

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