Department Environmental Microbiology

Toxic cyanobacterial blooms pose a significant burden to global water quality, and climate change will strongly increase the risk of toxic cyanobacterial blooms in Swiss lakes in the coming decades. Thus, to safeguard water quality for human drinking water supply, agriculture, aquaculture, and recreation, a comprehensive temporal and spatial cyanotoxin monitoring is essential. However, no such monitoring scheme of Swiss lakes currently exists. To alleviate this shortcoming, we are developing the CyanoSensor: a novel biosensor panel based on aptamer and CRISPR technology for fast, sensitive, and high-throughput monitoring of cyanotoxins in lake water.