Detection of Organic Compounds with Whole-Cell Bioluminescent Bioassays

Abstract

Natural and manmade organic chemicals are widely deposited across a diverse range of ecosystems including air, surface water, groundwater, wastewater, soil, sediment, and marine environments. Some organic compounds, despite their industrial values, are toxic to living organisms and pose significant health risks to humans and wildlife. Detection and monitoring of these organic pollutants in environmental matrices therefore is of great interest and need for remediation and health risk assessment. Although these detections have traditionally been performed using analytical chemical approaches that offer highly sensitive and specific identification of target compounds, these methods require specialized equipment and trained operators, and fail to describe potential bioavailable effects on living organisms. Alternatively, the integration of bioluminescent systems into whole-cell bioreporters presents a new capacity for organic compound detection. These bioreporters are constructed by incorporating reporter genes into catabolic or signaling pathways that are present within living cells and emit a bioluminescent signal that can be detected upon exposure to target chemicals. Although relatively less specific compared to analytical methods, bioluminescent bioassays are more cost-effective, more rapid, can be scaled to higher throughput, and can be designed to report not only the presence but also the bioavailability of target substances. This chapter reviews available bacterial and eukaryotic whole-cell bioreporters for sensing organic pollutants and their applications in a variety of sample matrices.

Development of a bacterial bioassay for atrazine and cyanuric acid detection

“…Many bioluminescent engineered bacteria have been reported in the literature, most of them dedicated to metals detection (Sorensen et al, 2006 ; Magrisso et al, 2008 ; Van der Meer and Belkin, 2010 ; Eltzov and Marks, 2011 , for review). Xu et al ( 2014 ) recently reviewed whole- cell bioluminescent bioassay for organic compounds detection, nevertheless none of them are dedicated to triazine.…”

Effect of low-dose ionizing radiation on luminous marine bacteria: radiation hormesis and toxicity

“…Now, the biological assay systems involving luminous marine bacteria are the traditional biotechnological application of the bioluminescence phenomenon (Xu et al, 2014;Thakur and Ragavan, 2013;Ranjan et al, 2012;Roda et al, 2009Roda et al, , 2004Thomas et al, 2009;Ivask et al, 2009;Girotti et al, 2008;Kudryasheva et al, 1998). The advantages of the bacteria-based bioluminescent assays are high sensitivity, simplicity, rapidity (1e3 min), and availability of devices for toxicity registration.…”

Co-Cultured Continuously Bioluminescent Human Cells as Bioreporters for the Detection of Prodrug Therapeutic Impact Pre- and Post-Metabolism

“…The use of autobioluminescence as a metabolic activity reporter system has been used in a variety of cell types and applications [ 7 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ], but has not been well-investigated for co-culture-based systems such as those used for drug discovery. In this work, we evaluated if this system could be used in this application, and if doing so could provide economical or logistical advantages relative to existing systems.…”