Aquaphotomics Workshop at 2008 IDRC in Chambersburg

t he last IdRC Conference in Chambersburg in 2008 was the host of the Second Workshop on Aquaphotomics (the First Workshop was held at the International NIR Conference in umeä, Sweden in 2007). the special circumstances at Wilson College, PA, uSA, and the traditional atmosphere of stimulating and encouraging discussions at the Chambersburg Conference inspired a very efficient new type of workshop that was held for three days and the results of the three-days work were presented at an afternoon session on Aquaphotomics included within the Conference programme. the members of the workshop came from different countries: Ireland, Italy, Canada, Japan, thailand, New Zealand and the Netherlands. they brought spectral data of various systems with the aim of identifying the role of the water in each respective data set. the “hands on” type of workshop led to very interesting findings. Most of the highest variations in each respective data set were found at absorbance bands that were listed in the water assignment table developed by the workshop leader Roumiana tsenkova from Kobe university in Japan. Water absorbance patterns, WAPs, change from system to system but they are observed at the same common water absorbance bands called water matrix coordinates, WAMACs. later, each WAP was related to respective functionalities or structures present in the data sets. the session was well attended and continued much longer than expected. one of the big achievements of the workshop was the identification of common WAMACs, which proved to be very important for describing functionalities of biological systems and could be further used for interpretation of the spectral data of other systems too. the workshop was opened by its organiser, Roumiana tsenkova. She explained the concept of Aquaphotomics that she proposed in 2005 at the International Conference on NIR in New Zealand and defined the terms of this new vis-NIR range. By analogy with all -omics sciences, it has been explained that there is a necessity to compile an aquaphotome, a database of water absorbance bands (WAMACs) in the vis-NIR range of the electromagnetic spectra by inducing variations of optical density under systematic perturbations for various systems containing water molecules and localising the activated bands. In order to describe and better understand the natural phenomena related to water, this aquaphotome development could be described as writing the alphabet of “water–light” interaction in which WAMACs would be the letters and WAPs would be the words. having such an alphabet, any perturbation (chemical, physical or any other nature) could be well defined using the “letters” of water. the water matrix contains a vast amount of hydrogen bonds that may be “seen” with vis-NIR light as it reflects any molecule embedded in it like a mirror. We call it a three-dimensional water mirror (water mirror on molecular level). Aquaphotomics and the proposed extend water mirror approach (EWMA) means looking at this mirror and reading what is written there. the Cyrillic alphabet was created by the two brothers Ciril and Methodius to translate and write the Bible in a language readable and understandable by the Slavic people. We still don’t understand much about the role of water and light in the biological world but we know that visible and near infrared light have the ability to penetrate objects, such as any biological systems, despite their high water content. this makes it possible to perform real-time, non-destructive analysis and acquire spectral data, i.e. register spectral variations and discover new water absorbance bands, water letters, in an immense number of systems. It is obvious that a large “vocabulary” is needed to describe the role of water in biological systems. therefore, this vocabulary should be built by finding new “words”, i.e. new absorbance patterns of water in various systems under various perturbations. In Roumiana’s presentation, WAPs of plant, animal systems and aqueous solutions under different perturbations and their WAMACs were presented in the 1300–1550 nm range. An illustration of the difference of WAPs for healthy and diseased plants was discussed. All healthy plants had the same average WAP over the time of monitoring but the WAP of inoculated plants was different. different “words” (WAPs) identified the healthy plant and the one inoculated with the virus. there were common water bands but the entire WAPs were different. It was mentioned that further comparative studies would shed light on the important bands related to disease diagnosis and its understanding. the next speakers presented supportive data coming from water–sugar or water– alcohol solutions or from entire biological systems such as milk, tomato and pasture. Akifumi Ikehata from the National Food Research Institute in tsukuba, Japan, presented an implication of aquaphotomics using his novel concept: partial molar absorption of o–h stretching band of water. he showed that in water-rich regions, alcohol molecules prefer to interact with free or weakly hydrogen-bonded (WhB) species of water and observed drastic change in the hydrogen bonding of water induced by solutes with high water solubility. these two findings support the main idea behind aquaphotomics that changes with the water matrix absorbance pattern reflect the existence of other molecules in the solution as an extended water mirror at the molecular level and give additional explanations in support of the finding that NIR spectroscopy can measure low concentrations of solutes in water. Further on, another presentation made by Roberto Giangiacomo from the Research Centre for Fodder Crops and dairy Productions, dairy unit, lodi in Italy discussed the behaviour of water during an osmotic process of apple spheres in concentrated sugar solutions by means of NIR. Relationships between sugars and water were studied by both two-dimensional correlation, calculated on NIR spectra recorded during the osmotic process, and NIR–NMR outer product analysis (oPA). A shift of the maximum absorbance in the first overtone range of the water oh-stretching was found, resulting from an increase of hydrogen bonds implicated in the solubilisation of the sugars. the contribution to aquaphotomics was demonstrated by the finding of water bands involved in sugar solubilisation and Aquaphotomics workshop at 2008 IDRC in Chambersburg