ISusMag – Selecting drinking water bacteria with magnetic fields.

Water treatment companies are more and more interested in chemical-free water treatment. This
is a solution that might not only decrease costs of chemicals, but also decrease possible formation
of by-products and contribute to decreasing the introduction of emerging contaminants in the
environment. A possible route for this is the use of magnetic fields based treatment. Magnetic
fields exist around us (our planet is surrounded by such fields) but are not broadly used in water
treatment. A reason for this situation isthe fact that water treatment is a rather traditional market
and magnetic treatment, conversely, a rather controversial and (still) not completely understood.
Even with such resistance, recently it has been shown that magnetic fields applied to drinking
water resulted in significant structural change of its microbiome [1]. This community structural
change was clearly detected with a newly developed flow cytometry method, where the
phenotypic characteristics of the entire microbial community could be analysed instantly [2-9].
Lab-scale batch experiments have shown that magnetic fields can selectively boost the growth of
smaller bacteria [1][3] and indicated as a next step that the same principle could be addressed in
pilot scale tests. ISusMag is structured to apply the robust and instant flow cytometry method to
examine the effect of magnetic fields on drinking water at pilot scale under realistic field
conditions. For this purpose, groundwater will be evenly distributed into two (pipe)lines of the
same length: one will be magnetically treated, and one will be used as control. Samples will be
taken at the end of the two pipes for flow cytometry examination. Measurement results can help
drinking water companies to understand whether a magnetic treatment is an alternative to
control the growth of pathogenic bacteria instead of classical chemical treatment (disinfection).