Combinando biotecnologia e robótica para prevenir e eliminar poluição dentro de portos

The project BioPorts aims to contribute to a new strategy for green maritime transport and ports, by developing biotechnological solutions, integrating native bioremediation agents with robotic systems, to respond to spills of crude oil, maritime fuels and HNS in seaports. Ports of Leixões and Viana do Castelo, will be used as case studies. This project will build on the technologies developed by the research team in previous projects, and adapt the workflow developed for the selection of degrading microorganisms from coastal and estuarine environments, to obtain microbial consortia tailor-made for each port. This is particularly challenging for seaports, where a combination of contaminants will require the combined action of microorganisms with different degrading abilities, and capacity to survive in such a harsh environment. The scientific strategy includes a set of tasks within the following specific objectives: · Establishment of the environmental and operational conditions in two seaports (Leixões and Viana do Castelo), providing tools for the successful application of tailor-made microbial consortia for bioremediation through autonomous vehicles; · Selection of the most relevant oils and HNS, for the development of bioremediation microbial consortia; · Characterization of native microbial community with capacity to degrade the target pollutants, in terms of their taxonomic and functional gene diversity; · Isolation of the most promising biodegrading bacterial strains and its characterization in terms of capacity to degrade the target pollutants; · Development, in microcosm experiments, of consortia of native microbial strains with high biodegradation capacity; · Optimization of the biomass production and immobilisation for the selected native microbial consortia; · Validation of the biodegradation efficiency of the immobilised microbial consortia in mesocosm experiments. · Adaptation of a team of an autonomous vehicles for bioremediation application, namely a drone for detection and response to surface pollution incidents, and an underwater vehicle to treat sediments/water column (chronic pollution); · Testing and validating the performance of the team of an autonomous vehicle for bioremediation application in one of the ports by performing a fully working demonstration of at a “quasi-real” scenario.