Abstract
According to WHO, getting access to clean water and proper sanitation in one of the basic human rights. With the rise in the industrialization and urbanization, negligent handling of effluents and inadequate maintenance of water resources, clean water has is becoming a limited resource. Predictions from WHO warns about half of the population will go through a water stressed situation in 2025. Immediate actions for remediations are required with the first step being the monitoring of water quality. Monitoring water quality has been carried out for few decades through chemical testing in laboratory-based or source site-based or through bioassays. In the recent years, biomonitoring has been done using biosensors using tiny microorganisms as a sensor to identify the presence of harmful pollutants. As a part of the solution; not part of the pollution, this work discusses about the monitoring of the quality of the water utilizing highly mobile microorganisms. When parts or whole of living organism are used for constructing any sensors, it is called a biohybrid system. Such biohybrids are created in order to overcome the limitations with the conventionally available robotic systems in terms of mobility, size and life span. Structures such as butterfly wings, lotus leaves and gecko limbs have very high performances, yet they are too complex for humans to replicate them synthetically. By augmenting robotics with 5 biology and biomimicry it is possible to overcome some of the current limitations in robotics for example muscular tissue-based actuators, production of animal cyborgs like insects and rodents being the extreme cases of function replacements (1-3). Several microorganisms possess the innate quality of moving around on their own, a quality that can be incorporated in robots. By guiding the movement of the organisms integrated with the system, the movement of the robots can be supervised. The objective of this research work is to utilize Paramecia for the biomonitoring of water quality in detecting the presence of water pollutants. The work starts with modernization of the isolation process of Paramecium using a novel electromigration chip. Then the presence of water pollutants has been correlated with the ubiquitous movement of Paramecium showing that this microorganism can be used for the indirect measurement of chemical and physical properties of water. Finally, the possibilities of integrating Paramecium with the microgels to construct with microrobots have been explored