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.

Exciting times are coming! The borders are open, people are travelling, and we were able to invite an international researcher who had been waiting for an opportunity for several months!

At the end of May this year, we were happy to receive our first guest, a visiting researcher coming from Hungary, Ms. Flora Vitalis, who is a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Zoltan Kovacs from Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences (MATE). Flora is now a first Aquaphotomics researcher who can be said to belong to the second Aquaphotomics generation, since Prof. Kovacs was actually a postdoctoral fellow in Biomeasurement Technology Laboratory of Prof. Tsenkova during 2013 – 2016.

Upon return to Hungary, he formed his own Aquaphotomics research group, which has been growing ever since, and becoming increasingly multinational. Zoltan was steadily rising through academic ranks, being promoted last year to a full professor, also International Affairs Advisor of the Institute, and for more than 2 years performing the function of Vice Dean for International Affairs at his University. Owing to the amazing dedication on his part, and the staff at the Aquaphotomics Research Department, the agreement between MATE and Kobe University has been signed about participating in the Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility Scholarship which enabled Flora’s visit.

Flora is interested in learning more about Aquaphotomics, and applying it in the food research, particularly related to the food authentication, preservation and detection of quality changes, especially fungal diseases at an early asymptomatic stage. She will be staying with us for two months, and she is already working full speed on her first paper about our joint project on monitoring the refrigerated storage of lettuce.

Our Aquaphotomics Department has celebrated its first birthday and the aquaphotomics children are growing! We would like to introduce our family of Kobe University.

In April this year a new researcher has joined our Lab!

Ms. Yoko Osafune, who graduated from Kobe University, Faculty of Agriculture has been working for some time in the industry, in the process quality control management before being recruited by Dr. Recella Co. Ltd. She has joined our Lab, with the special mission of learning Aquaphotomics with the final goal of establishing an Aquaphotomics laboratory specifically for the requirements of Dr. Recella in the research and development of water and cosmetic products based on the use of deep-sea water.

Yoko san will be staying with us for two years, and she has made a fast progress for the short time she has been with us so far. She has already reached the level people usually reach after 1 or 2 years of learning and wrote one paper in Japanese. She has a jovial personality, a special talent of making people feel at ease around her, connect to each other and work together. We have no doubt considering how extraordinary she is, that she will be a wonderful Lab leader one day in her company, and also make a great contribution to development of Aquaphotomics not only in Japan, but on the world level.

Dr. Jelena Muncan has been promoted to the position of Specially Appointed Associate Professor, Aquaphotomics Research Department, Graduate School of Agricultural Science, Kobe University, effective June 1, 2022.

In 2017 Dr. J. Muncan received Japanese Society for Promotion of Science post-doctoral research fellowship at Kobe University, Graduate School of Agricultural Science, Biomeasurement Technology Laboratory where, under the guidance of Prof. Roumiana Tsenkova (currently Specially Appointed Professor at the newly established Aquaphotomics Research Department) she worked on Aquaphotomics for non-invasive mastitis diagnosis in dairy cows.

In April 2021, she became a specially appointed Assistant Professor at the Aquaphotomics Research Department, Agricultural Science, Kobe University.

She has written 28 peer-reviewed papers and has given eight invited lectures at international conferences, and the number of citations per year of her published papers has increased exponentially.

In November 2021, Prof. Tsenkova and Dr. J. Muncan published the book “Aquaphotomics for Bio-diagnostics in Dairy” from Springer, which was ranked No. 1 in the Amazon sales ranking for Western books in spectroscopy in January 2022!

Introduction by Springer

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-7114-2

Publication articles in our website

https://aquaphotomics.com/ja/aquaphotomics-for-bio-diagnostics-in-dairy-first-aquaphotomics-book-to-be-published-in-december-2021/

Dr. J. Muncan’s promotion is the result of the university’s recognition of her significant contributions to the development of Aquaphotomics.

Jelena is a wonderful person who is both serious and persistent in her research and cheerful and friendly. We will continue to see her activities through Aquaphotomics, which transcends research fields and spreads around the world.

The latest paper published in the journal Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy, titled “Aquaphotomics for monitoring of groundwater using short-wavelength near-infrared spectroscopy” is a result of a long collaborative research between 3 aquaphotomics teams: Aquaphotomics Research Department from Kobe University, Aquaphotomics group at Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and a young Yunosato Aquaphotomics Lab from Hashimoto city in Wakayama, Japan.

The paper is the latest achievement of a long-term research project taking place in Wakayama, whose first results were published in 2016 in Talanta journal (Kovacs, Z., Bázár, G., Oshima, M., Shigeoka, S., Tanaka, M., Furukawa, A., Nagai. A, Osawa, M., Itakura, Y. and Tsenkova, R. (2016). Water spectral pattern as holistic marker for water quality monitoring. Talanta, 147, 598-608.). The entire research served as a basis for establishment of the first aquaphotomics-based water monitoring system at the Yunosato spa of Shigeoka Co. Ltd where the ground waters are being extracted and which is functioning since 2016. It also led to the establishment of the first private Yunosato Aquaphotomics Lab, which has since then expanded the research into the food, cosmetics, soil, human health, and even the sound!

In the latest paper, the novelty compared to the previous studies concerned with water monitoring, is that, for the first time, we improved the robustness and assessed the feasibility of the water spectral pattern – WASP in the short near infrared wavelength to be used as an integrative water quality marker by excluding the absorbance bands that are most influenced by the environment, namely temperature and humidity.

The results of the study are also presented in a novel way to put more accent on the work associated with the selection of bands that can serve as water matrix coordinates – WAMACs. While there are numerous publications reporting results in the area of 1^st overtone of water (1300 – 1600 nm), the selection of WAMACs in other regions of water near infrared spectrum is still somewhat of a difficulty for researchers, as we have found out from the audience attending aquaphotomics webinars. The process of selection of WAMACs from the available absorbance bands, as well as the assignments of the absorbance bands in the region 600 – 1050 nm have been provided in the paper in great details.

We showed which bands were influenced by humidity and temperature, and made sure that they are excluded from the final WASPs. This efficiently prevented “false alarms” due to the environmental changes led to development of robust, unique WASP for each of the mineral waters that is subjected to daily screening.

The paper is available online since 11 May, 2022 and can be found at the following address: 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1386142522005273#f0035

The study uniquely presents results how spectral patterns and hydrogen-bonding of groundwater samples were affected by changes in environmental factors – temperature, humidity, time and others. Despite these effects, Aquaphotomics analysis resulted in obtaining consistent, specific spectral patterns during the entire monitoring period, unique for each groundwater that can be used as its fingerprint and monitored over time. These results confirm that Vis/ NIR spectral pattern can be used as an integrative marker of water status, stable over time, providing the basis for an efficient cost-effective method for monitoring of water.