Source water quality monitoring is an essential public health service necessary to ensure environmental health and safety. Toxic chemicals released into the environment due to increasing anthropogenic activities and natural events (e.g. forest fires) continue to threaten the health of our watersheds. Conventional monitoring quantifies specific substances and compares those values to known regulatory guidelines. This approach is limited to targeted substances and is not practical for unexpected or unspecified toxicants in the sample. Furthermore, environmental contaminants often present as mixtures and the interplay between different toxicants can profoundly impact a sample’s overall toxicity. Therefore, measuring whole mixture toxicity is critical to supplement existing analytical approaches. In this study, we demonstrate the application of a novel cytotoxicity method to monitor and assess surface water quality using waters impacted by the 2016 Horse River wildfire in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo in Alberta, Canada. The testing method utilizes a real-time cell analyzer technology for non-invasive and continuous monitoring of perturbations to cellular growth after exposure to individual toxicants or mixtures. The human HepG2 cell line was selected as our target to generate human health relevant data. The quantitative output of the method is the water quality index (WQI), a single metric that captures the cumulative cellular response over the exposure period (72 h). A comparison of WQI values of river water samples collected from locations upstream and downstream from the wildfire site over a three-year period (2017-2019) facilitated the analysis of temporal and geographical trends (Figure 1). This water cytotoxicity testing method provides an important tool to assess total toxicity of chemical mixtures in source waters and to generate biologically relevant data for public health purposes.

Post-wildfire surface water quality monitoring using a novel water cytotoxicity test

ACS Fall 2021

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