Members: Natan Orlov

Supervisor: Prof. Aharon Agranat, Yonatan Uziel

This project strives to develop a chemical sensing system that detects the presence of a target material at critical points of an urban water supply system. Our system is based on using bioluminescent sensing bacteria – ‘Bioreporters’ as the core sensing elements.

Bioreporters are genetically engineered bacteria that act as a small independent laboratory that senses the presence of a specific target material and emits measurable bioluminescent light. Employing different types of Bioreporters that sense different target materials provides the basis for a generic optoelectronic chemical sensing methodology with tremendous versatility.

Specifically, in this project, we aspire to build a generic optoelectronic system that employs bioreporters to detect disinfection-by-products at the output of a disinfection station. Water from natural sources is chemically treated to remove pathogens, however, these sources contain contaminants such as leaves that react to the chemical treatment and release harmful chemicals back into the water. These are exactly the types of disinfection-by-products we aim to detect.

The prototype that will be constructed within the framework of this project will be the basis for a scalable sensing array with the capability of on-site and parallel detection of multiple target materials. The prototype will consist of a single sensing channel that may be a part of a larger sensor array. Each channel can detect and quantify the presence of target materials in an inspected sample retrieved from the disinfection facility.

The sensing channel consists of three tracks, in each, bioreporters are exposed to a specific sample of fluids: a sample retrieved from the disinfection station, control and a standard solution containing a known concentration of target material. In each track, the bioluminescence emitted is sampled and digitized producing a three-term vector sequence, from which presence and concertation can be determined.