An ongoing collaboration

Macquarie University has been collaborating with Sydney Water for more than two decades to ensure Sydney’s drinking water is clean.

A clean drinking water collaboration

This collaboration originated as a result of the detection of waterborne parasites Giardia and Cryptosporidium in water supplies. Detecting parasites in large volumes of water is particularly challenging and this required a suite of novel techniques that combined the then cutting-edge innovations of microbiology and optoelectronics.

The team developed antibodies and nucleic acid probes that targeted the parasites and were then labelled with fluorescent markers. When this was combined with an adapted flow cytometer a novel detection mechanism was created.

20 years later and Macquarie is still collaborating with Sydney Water and this technology continues to be used throughout the world.

Professor Duncan Veal, who led the project, said, “the university was very supportive in terms of grants and particularly support collaboration with industry; it supported our role in working for the community good. It was a university that broke down the barriers to create the collaborative and collegiate environment that is key to innovation.”