From TSU, three participants entered the final of the competition, of which the university won a diploma for 1st place in the nomination "Agro-, bio- and food technologies" - brought Egor Lebedev, post-graduate student of the Institute of Ecological and Agricultural Biology (X-BIO) of TSU (supervisor - Professor X-BIO Leonid Adonin).
Yegor Lebedev combines postgraduate studies with work as a junior researcher at the X-BIO Institute under the supervision of Dmitry Andreev, who proposed to Yegor a topic for biotechnological research in accordance with the objectives of the project for the creation of integrated bioanalytical systems of the program of activities of the West Siberian Interregional Scientific and Educational Center (ZAPSIBNOC) of the Tyumen region, KhMAO-Yugra and YANAO in the direction of "Biological safety of humans, animals and plants".
Based on the results of the project "Frame-by-frame microscopy of immobilized diatoms: towards new biosensors", the young researcher showed that live diatoms immobilized by polyamines in capillaries and microfluidic chips are promising for biomonitoring applications.
The project was supported by Denis Tikhonenkov, head of the new laboratory for the regional megagrant "Aquabiosafe" ("Aquatic ecosystems and biosafety as the basis for sustainable ecological and social development of Western Siberia"), providing a graduate student of diatom algae culture from the biobank of the I.D.Papanin Institute of Biology of Inland Waters of the Russian Academy of Sciences – a partner institute of TSU in ZAPSIBNOTS and in the strategic academic leadership program of universities "Priority-2030" for project work.
Determining the quality of water resources, primarily drinking water, wastewater control - all this requires a universal method of analyzing pathogens with a huge variety (viruses, bacteria, protists and others), which limits the applicability of physical and chemical methods. Conventional biological methods provide versatility, but are time-consuming, complex in automation and mass application.
The head of the research group Dmitry Andreev revealed the main value of the new approach: "The proposed method, based on the image analysis of the movement of organelles and the morphology of diatoms placed in a laboratory-on-a-chip, will automatically detect the appearance of pathogens and even identify some of them using a conventional smartphone."
"New technologies open up new opportunities, make monitoring of biological and ecological safety of aquatic ecosystems accessible and automated. Monitoring can be carried out in the mode of network biocontrol, including as an initiative of citizen science", - said the first vice-rector of TSU Andrey Tolstikov.
It should be noted that graduate students of TSU cultivate a tradition of successful performances in the research competition of the forum "Science of the Future - the Science of the young", which is positioned as the main youth scientific event of the year in Russia. In 2020, Ruslan Safargaliyev, a graduate student of the Physics and Technology Institute of TSU, became the winner of the research competition in the field of Ecology and Energy.
Minister of Science and Higher Education of Russia Valery Falkov on the sidelines of the forum announced the preparation of the start of a new competition of megagrant projects. "We will hold a new, already ninth competition for the selection of projects for 2022 and plan to support at least 30 candidates," the head of the department said.