Today we highlight a recent ecotox study issuing from a collaboration between the Sánchez Pérez lab (CIESOL/Spain) and the Roslev lab (AAU/Denmark). In this study our well plate respirometry system was used to investigate the effect of water treatment methods on microbial communities.

Belachqer-El Attar et al. evaluated various water treatment methods in a battery of ecotoxicological tests to assess the safety profiles of the treatments on a diverse set of organisms ranging from algae, plants, and microorganisms.
They combined well established and regulated ecotoxicology tests with a novel test to assess the effect on microbial communities.

The microbial community test was performed using the Loligo well plate respirometry system for high throughput analysis of multiple samples from both aquatic and terrestrial sources from Denmark and Spain.

They found that the novel solar chlor-photo-Fenton (SCPF) process only showed low-toxicity for both microbial life and plant health. Compared to conventional chlorination, which showed clear toxic effects in several assays, the SCPF process consistently resulted in much lower toxicity across the tests.

These findings are especially important for agricultural irrigation, where reclaimed waste water can address water scarcity issues, particularly in the mediterranean region of Europe.

Finally, The study demonstrates the value of including complex microbial communities in ecotoxicological tests. These tests will better reflect the real-world ecosystems and may reveal effects that single-species tests miss.

The paper titled Ecotoxicological assessment of wastewater treated by the novel solar chlor-photo-Fenton process for sustainable crop irrigation is published Journal of Environmental Managment and can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2026.128569

Do you want to learn more about the Respirometry system used in this paper?

• Microplate respirometry system
• MicroResp ™: Automated microplate respirometry software
• More papers published using the Microplate system