The traditional ways to examine groundwater organisms are based on pumping the samples to the surface thereby interfering with the conditions that you are analyzing. That equation is altered by lab-on-chip platforms. They allow you to use small sample volumes, study microbial communities or stygofauna behavior in situ, and obtain results without taking liters of water to the laboratory.

● You want to test the hypothesis that a certain concentration of PFAs is detrimental to ground water bacteria. Microfluidic chip will be able to subject communities to unambiguous gradients of said compound and measure cell viability in real time. One experiment with different concentrations of the same compound.
● Microfluidics would be of real use to this call in biosensor integration. Biological recognition can be incorporated directly into a chip and detector fields can monitor nitrates, pharmaceuticals, or new pollutants at concentrations unnoticed by the conventional sensors.
● In ecotoxicity applications, organ-on-chip or organism-on-chip systems allow you to run chronic exposures on small invertebrates under controlled flow conditions, which is difficult to do with bench-scale aquaria with cave-dwelling or interstitial species.
● Standardisation campaigns across many field sites using the same chip design could be performed using microfluidic platforms by your consortium, which directly responds to the request of the Commission, to harmonised and validated methods.

Having a microfluidics partner would provide your proposal with a specific innovation track of sensor creation and ecotoxicity testing, two out of the three activities explicitly called in the call.