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– Montserrat Carrascal, from the Superior Council of Scientific Research (IIBB-CSIC): “The study of waste water is a great source for the detection of rodents in any city around the world or, if sampling is carried out at specific points in the sewer, a rodent map can be created.
– The research has been carried out in the framework of the National Project funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation waterPRINT and coordinated by ICRA.
Barcelona has hosted the 18th Annual Workshop On Emerging And Lc-Ms/Ms Applications In Environmental Analysis And Food Safety) organized by the CSIC and the Catalan Water Research Institute (ICRA) . A debate space whose aim has been to encourage the exchange of information between scientists from the academic world, government agencies and industry.
Damià Barceló, director of (ICRA) and president of the meeting’s scientific committee, has declared that “the presence in our country of a scientific congress of these characteristics with more than 130 experts from all over the world proves, once again, the capacity for convening and international leadership to attract and share new ideas and the latest advances in mass spectrometry.”
One of the presentations given was that of Montserrat Carrascal, from the Superior Council of Scientific Research (IIBB-CSIC), who affirmed that: “rodent pests are a danger to human health because of the diseases that they can transmit through the bacteria that infect them and through the transmission of fleas, ticks and mites. In addition, they compromise the integrity of infested structures and, once established, are very difficult to remove. In big cities, rats live in the sewers. If no control action is taken, these rodents can live up to 7 years and reproduce up to 4 times a year with an average of 10-14 young, so the number varies rapidly in a few months.’
Currently, several strategies are used for the surveillance of these pests, generally based on animal counts and their extrapolation to the total population. The number of animals in large cities is usually referred to as the number of rodents per inhabitant. For example, it is estimated that in the city of Barcelona there may be one rat for every 4 inhabitants, and some estimates speak of up to 10 rodents per inhabitant in New York. There is, however, no standardized method for determining their numbers, estimating population density, or understanding their population dynamics.
Surveillance of rodent pests in wastewater using environmental proteomics
In a study led by Carrascal, from the Biological and Environmental Proteomics Group, at the IIBB-CSIC in Barcelona, a strategy has been developed that uses wastewater for the detection and quantification of rodents that is based on the detection of proteins specific to these animals.
Rat faeces, in the same way as human faeces, contain proteins that are secreted in the pancreas, which perform their function during the digestion of food and are subsequently eliminated. The detection of these enzymes, pancreatic amylases, in wastewater indicates the presence of live animals, and relative quantification of human amylase could allow us to monitor the increase or decrease of rodent feces in these samples.
Thus, the study of wastewater is a great source for rodent detection in any city around the world or, if sampling is done at specific points in the sewer system, to create a rodent map. This work shows the potential of this tool for the detection of rodents using water from our sewers.
This research has been carried out within the framework of the WaterPRINT National Project funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and coordinated by ICRA.
The organization of the 18th Workshop On Emerging High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry (HRMS) And Lc-Ms/Ms Applications In Environmental Analysis And Food Safety has had the help of SCIEX, Agilent and Shimadzu, as silver sponsors, ThermoFischer Scientific y Walters, as bronze sponsors, and with the collaboration of Elsevier, WEC&N, Springer and King Saud University.
