Abstract
The manufacture and use of explosives throughout the past century has resulted in the extensive pollution of soils and groundwater, and the widespread interment of landmines imposes a major humanitarian risk and prevents civil development of large areas. As most current landmine detection technologies require actual presence at the surveyed areas, thus posing a significant risk to personnel, diverse research efforts are aimed at the development of remote detection solutions. One possible means proposed to fulfill this objective is the use of microbial bioreporters: genetically engineered microorganisms “tailored” to generate an optical signal in the presence of explosives’ vapors. The use of such sensor bacteria will allow to pinpoint the locations of explosive devices in a minefield. While no study has yet resulted in a commercially operational system, significant progress has been made in the design and construction of explosives-sensing bacterial strains. In this article we review the attempts to construct microbial bioreporters for the detection of explosives, and analyze the steps that need to be undertaken for this strategy to be applicable for landmine detection.
Highlights
The extensive production and use of explosives for both civilian and military purposes throughout the past century has created diverse environmental problems, including the contamination of soil and groundwater with explosive residues
The international Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) lists 2,4-dinitrotoluene (2,4-DNT) and 2,6-dinitrotoluene (2,6DNT) as possible carcinogens in humans (IARC, 1996), and has determined that evidence regarding the carcinogenic potential of TNT is still inadequate
Tan et al (2015) applied a similar approach to construct a bioreporter for the detection of nitroaromatic explosives, but instead of using a single gene promoter as the sensing element, five promoters found to respond to TNT, DNT, and DNB were fused to GFP
Summary
The extensive production and use of explosives for both civilian and military purposes throughout the past century has created diverse environmental problems, including the contamination of soil and groundwater with explosive residues. Bacterial bioreporters for explosives’ detection on the bioavailability and toxicity of the target compounds is based on the use of live cell sensors (Belkin, 2003; Van der Meer and Belkin, 2010) Such bioreporters have been proposed (Burlage, 2003; Garmendia et al, 2008; Yagur-Kroll et al, 2014) as a tool for the remote detection of buried landmines, out of which traces of explosives’ vapors have been demonstrated to leak and accumulate in the soil around them (Jenkins et al, 2001). The latter accounts for less than 1% of the explosive material, its vapor pressure is much higher than that of TNT, resulting in higher concentrations of 2,4-DNT at ground level (MacDonald et al, 2003); this compound is considered the most reliable landmine “signature” chemical (Jenkins et al, 2001)
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