title: Bacterial Biosensors for Measuring Availability of Environmental Pollutants.
abstract: Traditionally, pollution risk assessment is based on the measurement of a pollutant's total concentration in a sample. The toxicity of a given pollutant in the environment, however, is tightly linked to its bioavailability, which may differ significantly from the total amount. Physico-chemical and biological parameters strongly influence pollutant fate in terms of leaching, sequestration and biodegradation. Bacterial sensorreporters, which consist of living micro-organisms genetically engineered to produce specific output in response to target chemicals, offer an interesting alternative to monitoring approaches. Bacterial sensor-reporters detect bioavailable and/or bioaccessible compound fractions in samples. Currently, a variety of environmental pollutants can be targeted by specific biosensor-reporters. Although most of such strains are still confined to the lab, several recent reports have demonstrated utility of bacterial sensing-reporting in the field, with method detection limits in the nanomolar range. This review illustrates the general design principles for bacterial sensor-reporters, presents an overview of the existing biosensor-reporter strains with emphasis on organic compound detection. A specific focus throughout is on the concepts of bioavailability and bioaccessibility, and how bacteria-based sensing-reporting systems can help to improve our basic understanding of the different processes at work.
authors.affiliation: Department of Fundamental Microbiology, Bâtiment Biophore, Quartier UNIL-Sorge, University of Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. robin.tecon@unil.ch.
authors.forename: Robin
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Tecon
authors.affiliation: Department of Fundamental Microbiology, Bâtiment Biophore, Quartier UNIL-Sorge, University of Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. janroelof.vandermeer@unil.ch.
authors.forename: Jan Roelof
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Van der Meer
keywords: beta-galactosidase; bioremediation; gfp; luciferase; synthetic biology.; whole-cell living bioreporters