A successful cooperation of the Department of Applied Ecology with the Babeș-Bolyai University from Cluj, Romania, resulted in the publication of a new scientific paper, co-authored by Professor Branko Glamuzina, PhD, and published in the WoS Q1 journal Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy.
Professor Branko Glamuzina, PhD, scientist from the Department of Applied Ecology of the University of Dubrovnik, in co-authorship with Professor Simon Cinta Pinzaru and other scientists from the Babeș-Bolyai University from Cluj, Romania, published the scientific paper ‘SERS of cylindrospermopsin cyanotoxin: Prospects for quantitative analysis in solution and in fish tissue’ in the journal Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy, indexed in the first quartile (Q1) of the Web of Science (WoS) base.
This scientific paper continues a fruitful cooperation of the University of Dubrovnik and its Department of Applied Ecology with the Babeș-Bolyai University from Cluj, Romania. The cooperation started with FP7 Marie Curie Programme and Jadransers project, and it resulted in a series of scientific papers and ongoing research of marine bio resources in biotechnology and biomedicine.
The research relating to this paper was partly funded by the University of Dubrovnik through the VIF scheme in 2019, which was granted to the Croatian co-author.
The journal Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy has the IF (impact factor) of 4.831 for 2021, and is ranked as the 5th out of 43 journals in the Spectroscopy category.
The article is available at the following link:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1386142522011325
Cylindrospermopsin (CYN), a cyanotoxin occurring in environmental waters as a cyanobacteria metabolite, has recently raised an increased interest both in the scientific community and the environmental, food control and health care bodies due an increased incidence of the reports on poisoning and the lack of prompt, effective detection and monitoring techniques. The paper reports a comprehensive Raman and SERS spectroscopy analyses on this cyanotoxin and provides a detailed characterisation of the vibrational Raman signal based on DFT calculation as well as the adsorption properties with respect to the silver nanoparticles surface. A quantitative SERS analysis was done for the concentrations range from 0.218 nM to 2.18 µM in aqueous solution. Furthermore, the SERS discrimination of intoxicated and healthy fish tissue was researched by means of a linear discriminant analysis. Significant changes in the SERS signal of the toxic tissue compared to the normal one allowed a clear and fast differentiation of the toxic tissue with 100% specificity/sensitivity. The cross-validation procedure provided 100% clear separation based on the SERS data. The results open up reliable perspectives for the SERS monitoring of the marine environment, especially in mussel-rich areas such as the Bay of Malin Ston.
