MUSSEL – Early warning of contaminants in mussel cultivation

MUSSEL. Early warning system for automatic detection of contaminants and prediction of toxic episodes in mussel cultivation.

National Project

File: RTC-2015-4077-2 The main objective of the MUSSEL project is to develop a system for the immediate detection of contaminants in seawater, especially when the water is used for the cultivation of bivalve molluscs such as mussels. The project is oriented to solve the serious sanitary and economic problems that imply the presence in the sea water of heavy metals like Cadmium, Lead or Arsenic, as well as the presence of the call “red alga”, that can cause serious diseases in the human being. When the red algae appears, the harvesting and marketing of the mollusc is stopped, causing great economic losses. The project will develop a complex Early Warning system that, located in the cultivation rafts, will collect information from the sea water by means of an advanced system based on the selective filtering of the sea water and the detection of contaminants by means of electrolytic biosensors, agglutinating this information and sending it by wireless means to a central platform. All the information collected will be accessible through a “Cloud” platform that allows access to this information from mobile devices and PCs without the need for additional software. This platform will have multiple systems of communication of the alerts. Likewise, MUSSEL proposes to generate a series of tools of analysis that allow to help in the decision making related to the polluting risks in the culture of the mussel. Duration: 2015-2017 Project partners

The project has been funded through the Challenge-Collaboration 2015 programme