By James Janega, Blue Sky Reporter
The clean-tech challenge of finding water impurities faces a small problem. A few, actually.
Champaign-based ANDalyze, a company that sprang from research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says it’s working to meet those challenges through technology that’s tapping into a market for faster, more accurate water testing around the world.
The AND1000 Fluorimeter portable device is used to test heavy metals in water supplies. (Taylor Glascock/ Chicago Tribune/ March 5, 2014)
ANDalyze does its work with this as a backdrop:
For the really nasty contaminants, even a small amount of aqueous gunk is bad, so effective tests must be sensitive. And for all the easy tests, the payoff is small — because the field is already crowded. Also, municipalities and others keen to test water prefer an accurate analysis without waiting days or weeks.
ANDalyze, which estimates water-testing services as a $700 million market, applies lab techniques out of the University of Illinois that use gene-sequencing technologies of the last decade to breed DNA that bonds to water contaminants so quickly it can be done on site.