AROMATICS BUSTED

A FAST, EASY AND ACCURATE METHOD TO DETECT TOXIC AROMATIC COMPOUNDS

As aromatic pollution levels rise, and along with it the environmental and health hazards that it presents, finding a better way of detecting these aromatic compounds becomes more and more important. Some prokaryotes, including Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas putida, naturally produce proteins capable of both detecting toxic aromatic molecules and regulating the transcription of corresponding catabolic genes. However, these naturally existing biosensors are limited by their detection range, expression leakage, and induction ratio.

Using these proteins, our team designed a series of improved aromatic sensors and combined them with related enzymes from their original catabolic pathways to increase the molecule detection range of these sensors. In order to semi-quantitatively measure the concentrations of target compounds, we constructed a biological band-pass circuit, enabling our sensors to detect the concentrations of target compounds within a certain range. In sum, we have been working on a fast, easy and accurate way to detect toxic aromatic compounds.