Integrated evaluation and visualization of estuary sediment environmental analysis data

May 15, 2014

Search for unutilized resources assisted by networking data for microorganisms, organic and inorganic matter

Comprehensive analysis of simultaneous measurement data of estuary sediments for organic and inorganic matter and microorganisms was undertaken by RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) to build an effective and useful method to integrate evaluation of environmental metabolic analyses and to search for resources.

The research team sampled five river estuaries in the Kanto and Tohoku regions, and developed an integrated evaluation method to visualize changes in organic matter and microbial relations. The method takes both structural information for organic matter samples and analysis data of inorganic matter and microorganisms, and normalizes these datasets to enable multivariate analysis.

By using the developed analysis method, the team's knowledge of ecosystem services such as repair and maintenance of estuary environments that was obtained relying on the five human senses as "implicit knowledge", can be acquired as "explicit knowledge" by utilizing various measurement data.

Moreover, such sediments could possibly be home to microbial species capable of degrading or metabolizing biomass or accumulating minerals. This integrated evaluation method is also a valid analytical technique for finding such useful microbes.

Original article

Analytical Chemistry doi: dx.doi.org/10.1021/ac5005037

T. Asakura, Y. Date, J. Kikuchi,

"Comparative analysis of chemical and microbial profiles in estuarine sediments sampled from Kanto and Tohoku regions in Japan".

Contact

Jun Kikuchi

Team Leader

Metabolomics Research Group Environmental Metabolic Analysis Research Team