The Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory is the new home of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (Sams),and has been equipped with state-of-the-art water purification systems from Elga
Back in 1872 a Scottish marine scientist, John Murray, was a member of the Challenger Expedition, the first major oceanographic expedition of the world.
On his return he founded the Scottish Marine Station.
Today the organisation, called the Scottish Association for Marine Science (Sams) since 1993, is an internationally recognised centre of excellence promoting research and education in marine science and champion of the marine environment.
Oban has been home to Sams since 1968, when it moved from Millport, and this year its scientists and technicians moved into a brand new £12m facility: the Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory.
The project took two and a half years to complete and brings together a number of important national facilities.
In addition to providing laboratory and office space for Sams researchers, the new building houses the European Centre for Marine Biotechnology (ECMB) - designed specifically to provide lettable laboratory space for the 'incubation' of developing marine biotechnology companies.
It is also home to the national Culture Collection for Algae and Protozoa (CCAP), the largest such collection in Europe.
The new CCAP facility now amalgamates the Oban marine algal collection with the freshwater algae and protozoa collection, previously housed at the Freshwater Biological Association's facility at Windermere.
The scientists from both groups now work as a single team, with a vast depth of experience in micro-algal and protozoan culture.
The CCAP provides algal cultures for research and for the aquacultural industries, and Sams hopes to be able to develop the collection as a gene bank to contribute to new marine biotechnology developments.
Sams's principal role is in environmental science research, covering a range of disciplines including marine technology, marine physics, geology, microbiology, biogeochemistry, deep sea and coastal animal ecology and fisheries.
It engages in both pure and applied research, conducting multidisciplinary studies on aspects of eutrofication, pollution, climate change, and marine biodiversity relating to issues which include toxic algal blooms, the ecological effects of fish farming, oil and gas exploitation and nuclear decommissioning.
Sams is also a partner in the UHI Millennium Institute and delivers, at Dunstaffnage, an honours degree course in marine science.
Sams also has a post-graduate degree school currently having in excess of 20 PhD students.
Sams receives its principal pure research funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council to deliver the Northern Seas Programme.
This five-year initiative is aimed at improving understanding of how the sensitivity of marine ecosystems to environmental perturbation, both natural and anthropogenic, in coastal and oceanic waters from the coasts of Scotland up to the marginal Arctic pack ice zone, north of Svarlbard.
The programme addresses three themes: a) Understanding fjordic systems: insights for coastal and oceanic processes; b) Ocean margins: the interface between the coastal zone and oceanic realm; and c) Measuring and modelling change: sea sensors and bioinformatics.
Work in theme a) includes investigation of how pelagic microbial communities in northern coastal seas will respond to changes in the quality and quantity of nutrient inputs - a matter of great concern for the future of fish farming in Scotland and worldwide.
The team is also trying to understand past patterns of climate change by looking at the composition of mud cores from the sea bed and dating sediments, as well as investigating the fate of contaminants like heavy metals in the marine environment.
Some of the metals are naturally occurring, while some are the result of industrial pollution, and differentiating between them involves trace level analysis at ug/l and ng/l levels.
In theme b), studies are focussed on investigation of carbon flow through the benthic biosphere at the continental shelf edge and how this might be affected by physical submarine features like seamounts, banks and depressions, and by also by the benthic faunal composition.
Work also includes the study of the ecology of deep-water fisheries of the Northern Rockall Trough and continuing a long term monitoring programme of the Ellett line, a series of stations from the Scottish continental shelf to Rockall established by David Ellett and named after him.
This monitoring is very important for investigating oceanic climate variability in this area, where warm water flowing through the Rockall Trough moderates the climate of the region, keeping winters warmer than expected for this latitude.
Finally within theme c), the Sams marine technology team is developing instruments and sensors for remotely measuring physical, chemical and biological changes in the seas.
Technologies like satellite tracked drifters, satellite telemetry and control, smart instruments, seabed lander packages and global positioning systems (GPS) applications developed at Sams will provide data to input to other areas of the Northern Seas Programme.
The techniques involved in research at Sams range from cell culture to radiochemical tracing via molecular microbiological techniques like PCR, electrophoresis and DNA sequencing; trace analysis of heavy metals using ICP-MS and ICP-OES; trace organic analysis using GCMS and HPLC and seawater nutrient analysis using FIA.
All of these techniques require ultrapure water, and Sams has four separate stand-alone systems.
The first three were installed in December 2003 and the fourth, for the CCAP, early in 2004.
All four systems were supplied by Elga LabWater.
Each system consists of two-stages of purification: a primary stage and a polishing stage.
In each system the first stage is a Purelab Option S15 unit which produces up to 15l/h of pure water with resistivity of about 10M-Ohm.cm, by a combination of reverse osmosis and ion exchange.
Mains water passes through a pre-treatment cartridge, incorporating activated carbon, to remove chlorine, and a ten micron particle filter.
This is followed by reverse osmosis using the latest generation of high flux membranes to remove 95% of dissolved salts together with 99% of organic molecules larger than about 200 Dalton molecular weight and virtually all bacteria.
The purified water is stored in a 75 litre reservoir prior to being polished to ultrapurity.
For the geochemistry and analytical chemistry applications, polishing is by a Purelab Ultra Analytic, which has two ion exchange cartridges with intermediate ultraviolet irradiation and a final 0.05um ultra-micro filtration cartridge.
The ultraviolet lamp produces radiation at 185nm and 254nm.
The shorter wavelength oxidises trace levels of organic matter in the water while the longer wavelength is biocidal.
The final ultra-microfilter removes bacteria and particulate contaminants so that the resulting ultrapure water has resistivity better than 18.2M-Ohm.cm, total organic carbon (TOC) less than 2ug/l and a bacterial total viable count (TVC) of less than 1cfu/ml.
For the molecular microbiological and CCAP laboratories, polishing is carried out by a Purelab Ultra Genetic.
The Genetic is essentially the same as the Analytic but the final ultra-micro filter is replaced with an ultrafilter, which removes not only bacteria but also endotoxins to ensure a level of less than 0.001EU/ml, which is critical for certain microbiological work.
The use of this filter also produces water that is effectively free from RNase and DNase.
Both polishing units are provided with resistivity monitoring after the first ion exchange cartridge, after the UV lamp and finally at the point of use.
This means that any decline in quality due to exhaustion of the first ion exchange cartridge can be detected, and the cartridge changed before the final ultrapure water quality is affected.
In addition there is real-time monitoring of the ultrapure water TOC.
When there is no demand at the point of use, treated water is recirculated through the purification cartridges to ensure that chemical and microbiological quality is maintained.
The Elga Purelab Ultra combines many novel design features such as fully automatic sanitisation; automatic calibration and Pin coded controls.
These, coupled with the unique monitoring system and innovative electronic tagging, ensure that water quality does not deteriorate over time and ultra pure is always available at the application.
units are designed to give Sams ease of operation together with the level of validation required for state-of-the art research laboratory techniques.
This combination of innovative technology and design functionality gives Sams the ease of operation and the level of validation required for state of the art research laboratory techniques.
