FractioMate: Fast Identification of Water Hazards
Water, comprising over 70% of our planet, is the source of all life. To safeguard life, we must address the presence of emerging contaminants, including pharmaceuticals, endocrine-disrupting compounds, and perfluorinated compounds, in water sources. These contaminants pose serious health and environmental risks, such as DNA damage, developmental disruption, reproductive issues, and cancer.

As concerns about water emissions and pollution grow, ensuring the purity of our drinking water becomes paramount. Introducing FractioMateTM, a revolutionary solution.

FractioMateTM streamlines complex, expensive, and time-consuming Environmental Data Assessment (EDA) studies into robust, rapid, and sensitive analyses. It significantly enhances the identification of toxic compounds.

Key Features:

• Direct integration of biological and chemical labs.
• Drastically reduced EDA study duration, from weeks to days.
• Increased capacity by orders of magnitude, enabling 5 to 10 samples per week.
• Accelerated correlation of bioactivity/toxicity with accurate mass through integration.

High Throughput Effect-Directed Analysis - FractioMate
FractioMate employs SPARK Integrity as a linking technology for chemical and biological analysis. It separates compounds in a sample using liquid chromatography (LC). A portion of the eluent is transferred to a high-resolution bioassay (e.g., 96 or 384-well mammalian or yeast-based cellular format) using FractioMate's innovative spotting technology to test the biological activity of eluting compounds. The remaining part is directed to a mass spectrometer. Peak shapes from "reconstructed bioassay chromatograms," utilizing individually collected and bioassayed fractions, are efficiently correlated with accurate mass compound data obtained in parallel chemical analyses (in most cases, MS data).

The FractioMateTM was developed through collaborative efforts between the BioMolecular Analysis group, the Department of Environment & Health in the Faculty of Science, and VU Engineering Groups specializing in Electronics and Precision Mechanics. This development is made accessible to other research groups beyond VU under the name Tec4Science.

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