Almost 100,000 PLN from the Miniatura 4 competition

Paweł Wiercik PhD from the Institute of Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Geodesy, will receive nearly 41,000 PLN for research on the impact of humic substances contained in water and sewage on anion exchanger fouling. Prof. Tomasz Suchocki has received 44,000 PLN for testing the quality of polymorphisms obtained from Next Generation Sequencing with the use of neural networks.

Paweł Wiercik will carry out his work at the research station of the Wrocław Wastewater Treatment Plant (WOŚ) in Janówek. – Humic substances found in the soil during surface runoffs end up in rivers, causing an increase in the amount of suspended impurities and colour. They are also found in groundwater and sewage, hindering their treatment, e.g. in the process of ion exchange. At the installation in Janówek, I will be checking what amount of these humic substances causes the resins used for purifying water or sewage to lose their properties, says Dr. Paweł Wiercik.

The ion exchange resins used for the ion exchange process are nanoporous synthetic materials, resembling sand grains. Water or sewage flow into the grains, and during the flowing process ion exchange takes place.

- However, it is not as simple as that. Humic substances are very long hydrocarbon chains with negative ions in their structure. These ions penetrate into the grains of the anion exchange resin (removing negative ions), but the rest of the long chain coats their surface, so after some time they become useless. And in this research I am interested in the amount of these substances which renders further use of the resins uneconomical – explains Paweł Wiercik.

Prof. Tomasz Suchocki, a geneticist and statistician from the Department of Genetics at the Faculty of Biology and Animal Science, will conduct research on the validation of Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) detected using the Next Generation Sequencing technology (NGS) with a grant of 44,000 PLN. An additional task is to develop an easy-to-use algorithm based on the methodology of artificial intelligence, classifying SNP polymorphisms coming from the NGS as correctly or incorrectly detected.

- Establishing a methodology to validate single polymorphism markers for Next Generation Sequencing data is extremely important. This methodology would be widely used in the future by many researchers dealing with GWAS-type association analyses. They could easily verify the correctness of a polymorphism which in their research showed strong association with some disease or quantitative trait. Additionally, we have not come across a scientific publication in which statistical modelling based on artificial intelligence would be used to validate markers of a single polymorphism - explains Prof. Tomasz Suchocki.

The Miniatura 4 competition of the National Science Centre awarded, in total, 15 million PLN to the winning projects. The amount of funding for the implementation of a scientific effort lasting 12 months was between 5,000 and 50,000 PLN per project.