Kanaji Masakorala – Early Diagnosis of Iron Toxicity and Differentiation of iron toxicity tolerant and susceptible rice varieties

For the past two months we had a great pleasure of working together with, as we call him now – Kanaji san. Before he came to Aquaphotomics Research Department we heard a lot about him – we heard he is a great scientist with incredible knowledge about plants and that he is a much loved and admired Professor. And rightly so! As it also turns out, he is a wonderful ambassador of his country, and all of us now in the Lab would like to visit Sri Lanka and enjoy the beautiful beaches, tasty exotic food and fruits we never even knew existed, and also watch the traditional Sri Lanka dances!

Our Kanaji san is actually Prof. Dr. Kanaji Masakorala and he has had a very interesting life, travelling around the world, acquiring many skills and nice memories. He is born in Sri Lanka, where at the University of Ruhuna Sri Lanka, he got his bachelor degree in Botany! There he later on joined the Department of Botany as a lecturer. He then commenced a travel around the globe to discover more about the vast world of plants and Botany. In his master studies he specialized in Environmental toxicology at the University of Bergen, Norway and the University of Plymouth, United Kingdom. Then his travels led him to Beijing, China, where at the University of Science and Technology, he completed a PhD degree in Environmental Science in. In his MSc and PhD research, he applied different types of biomarkers in the characterization of abiotic stresses in plants due to exposure to heavy metals hydrocarbons and surfactants and others. He has been working as a Professor in Botany Since 2019 in the Department of Botany, Faculty of science, University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka. His main research interests are in environmental toxicology, plant stress biology, phytoremediation, bioremediation and bio monitoring. And now he can also add Aquaphotomics to his specialties! He just completed a postdoctoral research through the invitational fellowship received from Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS, Oct – Dec 2022) under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Roumiana Tsenkova. He explored Aquaphotomics as a nondestructive tool to characterize stress caused by iron (Fe 2+ ) toxicity in rice plants at the seedling stage. Our Department was very happy to have him here and we are looking forward to his next, hopefully longer stay! Until then we will continue working together and support him planting aquaphotomics roots in Sri Lanka!

Lashya Manage – Defining Soil Aquaphotome

At the beginning of August this year, we were happy to actually welcome our first guest from Sri Lanka, a new post-doctoral fellow Ms. Lashya Manage. Lasha san seems to also be a world traveler, like Kanaji san. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Agroecology, Faculty of Science and Technology, Aarhus University in Denmark, where she spent 3 years (2015 to 2018) attached to the AGRO team in the Department of Agroecology. Her previous knowledge and research interest in spectral and proximal sensors were well compatible with the activities of AGRO. During her Ph. D. she explored the suitability of the benchtop visible near-infrared diffuse reflected spectroscopy and contemporary pedotransfer functions as effective, rapid, and indirect alternatives to conventional soil analysis. In addition, her project demonstrated that soil moisture effects are closely related to different soil characteristics and their potential to retain water. Her research studies led to the publishing of research articles about how spectroscopy can be used for prediction of different soil characteristics and how the moisture affects the prediction accuracy of spectroscopic measurements. Her previous research team reported that apart from the moisture content, water retention characteristics govern the moisture effect on soil spectroscopy analysis. This is how she became interested in water and soil, and learned about Aquaphotomics.

Dr. Lashya Manage joined the Aquaphotomic research group in August this year and started her work particularly attached to the Yunosato Aquaphotomics Lab in Hashimoto, Wakayama. Beyond the boundaries of the negative moisture effect, Aquaphotomics has inspired her knowledge to understand water as an information source of providing insight into soil characteristics and functionalities. She has been working in the Yunosato Lab for almost half a year now. In her first study, she investigated the difference in soil types and their characteristics with the variable soil moisture content. Apart from that, she started monitoring soil responses at different stages of plants growth and evaluating the interaction between soil and plant responses by acquiring the NIR spectra from both soil and plant leaves during the corresponding growth stages of the crop. She has presented her first findings at the regional Aquaphotomics Conference in Japan, that took place on 23-24th November in Yunosato, and she is currently working on her first paper on this topic. Together with the Aquaphotomics team and planned research collaborations with Professor Fujitake’s team from the Department of Agrobioscience in Kobe University, their future research will be exploring Aquaphotomics as a novel and holistic approach for investigating soil properties and functions. Lasha san’s hope for the future is that, at the end of this research, she will be able to create soil aquaphotome.

Alexandra Petrova – Aquaphotomics for Medicine and Healthcare

The latest and youngest addition to our Aquaphotomics family is Alexandra Petrova. In Japan, we call her Ale san, which sometimes can be heard as Ari san, meaning Miss Ant (so cute! kawaii ◕‿◕✿).

Ale san is a graduate of the University College of London (UCL), Biochemical Engineering Department and she came to Japan specifically to learn Aquaphotomics and help with applications in medical realm. She is also a keen traveler and her travels also led her to Peru where she got very interested in music and plants and alternative healing modalities. If you met Ale san in Japan, then it is most certain, whoever you are, and wherever you are, she will sooner or later insist on playing traditional Andean ceremonial flute, especially and specifically for you. We asked Alexandra to say something about her and Japan, of her impressions so far and her hopes and dreams for the future. So, here it is.

~ Ari chan in her own words ~

“I have been here for few months now, in Japan, the laboratory of Aquaphotomics, and the horizons are opening for me like nothing I could ever imagine. I am from Bulgaria, so the challenges of living abroad are ever present and ever gifting. Here, the Aquaphotomics family have made this big transition and paramount jump of my life to end with the smoothest possible landing. The laboratory takes part in multidisciplinary projects and has connections with one of the most intriguing scientists on our planet today. This has given me the opportunity to learn about various fields while working on the topics that inspire me the most. In Bulgaria, I lastly worked with IVF and fungal based medicinal supplements. Ultimately, I wish to connect these fields with my knowledge gained here, and the possibilities in medical healthcare. I think many new possibilities can be created with aquaphotomics, such as non-invasive biomonitoring and real-time, quantifiable diagnostics.

My first project was to learn and apply Aquaphotomics and Multivariate spectral analysis to measure and understand the effect of a Music Based Intervention (MBI). MBI has been used in medicine for thousands of years and is now regaining interest from numerous healthcare practitioners and researchers across the globe. I am currently preparing my first paper based on these results, and I was happy to recently present a poster and oral talk during Japanese Aquaphotomics conference held in Yunosato, Hashimoto. I am also now working on analyzing near infrared spectra of people before and after meditation-based psychotherapy. I am very grateful to be part of the Aquaphotomics family and cannot wait to see what, where and who else this journey will unfold for me.”

We are very pleased to announce that a new article on Aquaphotomics has been accepted and will be published in Molecules 2022, 27(19), 633. (published: 26 September 2022)

“Pilot Aquaphotomic Study of the Effects of Audible Sound on Water Molecular Structure” by by Aleksandar Stoilov, Jelena Muncan, Kiyoko Tsuchimoto, Nakanishi Teruyaki, Shogo Shigeoka, and Roumiana Tsenkova

Abstract
Sound affects the medium it propagates through and studies on biological systems have shown various properties arising from this phenomenon. As a compressible media and a “collective mirror”, water is influenced by all internal and external influences, changing its molecular structure accordingly. The water molecular structure and its changes can be observed as a whole by measuring its electromagnetic (EMG) spectrum. Using near-infrared spectroscopy and aquaphotomics, this pilot study aimed to better describe and understand the sound-water interaction. Results on purified and mineral waters reported similar effects from the applied 432 Hz and 440 Hz frequency sound, where significant reduction in spectral variations and increased stability in water were shown after the sound perturbation. In general, the sound rearranged the initial water molecular conformations, changing the samples’ properties by increasing strongly bound, ice-like water and decreasing small water clusters and solvation shells. Even though there was only 8 Hz difference in applied sound frequencies, the change of absorbance at water absorbance bands was specific for each frequency and also water-type-dependent. This also means that sound could be effectively used as a perturbation tool together with spectroscopy to identify the type of bio, or aqueous, samples being tested, as well as to identify and even change water functionality.

The article can be viewed and downloaded at https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules27196332.

Recent News

• Professor Roumiana Tsenkova Named Among the World’s Top 2% Scientists for Six Consecutive Years2025-11-06
• “The Voice of Water” – From EXPO2025 Aquaphotomics Day2025-11-01
• “Aquaphotomics Day” featured in Bulgarian News Agency (BTA)2025-10-21
• Discover the Beauty of Water and Life in new documentary “Pale Blue Dot”2024-10-24
• Introducing Aquaphotomics: A Beautiful Japanese Comic on the Science of Water2024-10-08

In June, our specially appointed assistant professor Jelena Muncan, has been promoted to an Associate Professor! We have asked Jelena to tell us about how she feels about it after her meeting with the Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture at Kobe University. “First of all,”, she said, “I feel a lot of gratitude, especially when I heard the Dean saying how our Department is making a great contribution to the University with our research and publications. This was really beautiful to hear that we make a difference and that our work is appreciated. And, I always feel very grateful to Japan and to Prof. Tsenkova for the opportunity to be able to work on something I love and to grow. It is now 5 years since I became a part of Aquaphotomics team in Kobe, and I can only describe this time as an immense growth in my knowledge, abilities and ideas. And I would also like to say that I am so grateful to be surrounded by incredible people; Prof. Tsenkova’s laboratory has always had amazingly talented and hard-working people, and it is such a pleasure to live in that atmosphere every day. I also have to say a big “THANK YOU” to Recella Co. Ltd. The company’s donation made it possible to establish the new Aquaphotomics Research Department and to proceed with our exploration of water”.

We would like to introduce our family following on from the previous two articles.

Our second guest arrived in early June from Italy – Mr. Francesco Chierici, a Biomedical engineer from DIMEAS, Politecnico di Torino and exchange visitor at The College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida, USA, in 2021. He will be at the
Aquaphotomics Research Department studying microtubules!!! This is the topic that has always been fascinating for us, and we feel very lucky to be able to collaborate on this topic with Prof. Dr Jack Tuszynski and Francesco. Together, we hope we will be able to
reveal some secrets of the water role in the functionality of these amazing cell organelles and hopefully make at least a little step towards understanding of the complex, but ever interesting phenomena such as consciousness.