Anthracene research program findings
Anthracene, as an important member of can impose negative impacts on growth or development of some microorganisms which act as decomposers in ecosystems and influence the flow of energy and materials. In addition, it can also inhibit photosynthesis of plants through processes of photomodification. As a result, anthracene imposes great impact on environment especially aquatic environment, which has risen great attention on them.
Under the supervision of Dr. Nancy Pitts and Dr. Gordon Murray, fourth year environmental science student Anny Wei did a research which aims to find whether the distances from the discharge point and tide level can affect and give rise to significant differences among concentrations of anthracene in the same section of Salmon River under the treatment of different tide levels (high, medium and low) as the experimental factor, and the distances(15m is an interval) from the discharge point as the blocking factor.
In the morning of October 27th of last year，Ms. Natasha McKillop and Anny Wei went to the part of Salmon River which was near the discharge point for sampling. The sampling range was 150 meters from Park Street Bridge (sum of both sides). Student should sample every 15 meters, and the replication level should be 3. Therefore, 90 raw water samples were obtained for analysis.
For analysis, the samples were extracted by dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME). The reagents which were used for extraction were selected from a journal article which compared the effectiveness of several kinds of combinations of reagents. As expected, the results showed that there existed significant differences between high and low tide levels in both sides of the Park Street Bridge near Stella Jones Inc.
The research made a contribution to the detailed researches of how the different tide levels give rise to the appearance of significant differences among concentration of anthracene which can be determined and analyzed specifically instead of as a member of PAHs in freshwater ecosystems like Salmon River instead of marine ecosystems.
The numbers of researches which focus specifically on anthracene instead of all PAHs were increasing during past years, but the related information still cannot be found easily. Therefore, more detailed and specific researches still need to be accomplished in order to make more advancements.