Team:CIDEB-UANL Mexico/Project/Abstract

Nowadays due to the contamination caused by pollutants such as heavy metals, it is important the implementation of simple and complete detection methods. This project aims to create a biosensor that may detect the presence of heavy metals in water. In order to construct the biosensor, a genetic circuit was built into E. coli. The circuit represents a model, which works with Arabinose. It is a semi-quantitative biosensor. The circuit has 3 parts: High concentration, Low concentration and Stand-by state. Each part of the circuit has a different response: when there is a high concentration of Arabinose the bacteria shows a yellow fluorescent color; when the concentration is low it uses a sensitivity tunner that increases the response from the same amount of Arabinose, which makes the bacteria to appear in a red fluorescence; and when there is no Arabinose in the sample, the bacteria shows a green fluorescence.