Fabrication of unique polymeric tracers for applications in water management (Funwat)

Funded by the NTNU Discovery Pilot Project

This NTNU Discovery pilot project aims to develop polymeric DNA-based magnetic tracers for hydrological and environmental monitoring. Traditional tracers like salts, isotopes, and dyes offer limited multiplexing and uniqueness, while existing DNA-based (silica) tracers, despite high sensitivity, suffer from slow production, poor scalability, and low encapsulation efficiency.

Building on prior work with silica-encapsulated DNA tracers and recent success using flash nanoprecipitation (FNP) to rapidly produce size-controlled, polymer-encapsulated magnetic nanoparticles, the project aims to co-encapsulate DNA and iron oxide nanoparticles within biodegradable polymers — cutting production time from a week to minutes while improving encapsulation efficiency and enabling tunable control over tracer size and magnetic response.

Key activities include optimizing co-encapsulation, characterizing tracer properties, verifying DNA detectability via qPCR, and benchmarking against silica-based tracers under environmentally relevant conditions, with potential applications in monitoring rivers, groundwater, and industrial effluents.