Abstract
Monitoring of environmental contaminants serves a vital role in proactive environmental management and pollution control. Research efforts have been centered on the development of robust whole-cell biosensors in recent years. However, data acquisition, multiple contaminants detection and biosafety issues limit the on-site application of such biosensors. Microfluidic system exhibits great potential to face these challenges via coupling biosensors. Here, we prospect a novel microfluidic based whole-cell biosensor (MWCB) for multiplexing monitoring of diverse contaminants, and design strategies to further increase the specificity, sensitivity and accuracy, reduce signal delay and expand shelf life of the proposed MWCB for on-site environmental applications. The development of MWCB demands multidisciplinary cooperation, and the sensing platforms are highly promising for real-world contaminants monitoring.
Highlights
Increasing discharge of multitudinous contaminants into environments has caused detrimental impacts on the ecosystem and human health
Detecting and monitoring the distribution of contaminants is fundamental for decision making and environmental management
A wide variety of biosensors have been developed based on the transduction principles, whose operation mechanisms and environmental applications have been extensively reviewed and compared (Long et al, 2013; Marrazza, 2014; Mehrotra, 2016; Arduini et al, 2017; Pashchenko et al, 2018)
Summary
Increasing discharge of multitudinous contaminants into environments has caused detrimental impacts on the ecosystem and human health. The colorimetric biosensors can rapidly respond to the target contaminants and are usually directly visible without external signal transducing equipment, simplifying the data acquisition process and demonstrated great potential for on-site applications. The sensing modules in the whole-cell biosensors can quantitatively detect a series of contaminants via expressing different signal intensities.
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