Real Time Monitoring System of the Exhaust Emission of Individual Vehicles (2011-2013)

The aim of the SMELLER project is the achievement of a system that acquires and elaborates data about exhaust emission of individual vehicles in real time. Although the technology for pollutants measurements is a well developed field, the activity of this project is the identification of new systems suitable to the development of a data acquisition model able to identify emissions’ sensor, biosensors for the biological impact, data base for the elaboration of inputs and the certification of the results.

The Biosensors Unit of the project Smeller has the task of identifying marker of exposure to emissions from vehicles on both immortalized cell lines and on cell free models.
In particular, the Unit will use:
Enzymes. Measurements of enzyme activity will deal with an appropriate software to estimate the dose inhibiting 50% activity (IC 50), The parameter IC 50 is directly correlated with the degree of inhibition and thus to the potential toxicity of the emissions with the biological sensor.
The data of enzyme activity will be represented in the form of dose-response curves as a function of the concentration of inhibitor on half-log graphs, or by linear transformation to obtain adequate diagnostic graphs that demonstrate a simple or multiple inhibition (Hill plots, of Linewaver-Burk, of Henderson-Yagi and Ozawa).

Cells. The extent of biological damage will be examined both for standard emissions and those monitored by the chemical sensors. The results will be related to exposure doses and a scale of values will be constructed, which can be associated to the chemical sensor that monitors emissions, in order to have in real-time both the emission value and the value of any biological damage.

Development of Raman spectroscopy apt to the evaluation of cellular responses by analysing the comparison of the spectra obtained from control and treated samples. Raman spectroscopy is realized by the research group of Prof. Zerbi of the Polytechnic of Milan.

Portable instrumentation for monitoring on the field. An IR portable spectrometer will be realized, for the real-time monitoring of biological responses to traffic emissions.

Mathematical model. The results obtained from the biological responses will be included in a suitable database, which can be interfaced with the chemical sensor.