Team:Utrecht/Description
The past decades have brought astonishing progress in the development and use of pharmaceuticals promoting public health. Unfortunately, increasing amounts of medical waste now threaten our ecosystems. We therefore developed Detaxion, a biosensor aimed to rapidly identify harmful water-based pharmaceuticals. Detaxion is synthetic biology-based, and is highly amendable to detect various pharmaceutical species. Specifically, we mutated the binding site of the chemotaxis receptor Tar in E. coli bacteria to recognize paired pharmaceutical compounds. Accordingly, upon ligand binding the fluorescence of the Tar-receptor associated BRET-pair decreases in a quantifiable manner. We additionally introduced customized methylation-sites to extend the detection range of the Detaxion biosensor. Our results thus far show successful measurement of the fluorescence energy transfer pairs used in Detaxion. Moreover, we developed a capillary-based assay to confirm BRET measurements. Taken together, Detaxion constitutes a synthetic biology-based approach to detect and quantify pharmaceutical waste in water, for safeguarding of vital water supplies.