Design, construction and characterization of a Green fluorescent protein based bioreporter using Escherichia coli as a host for bioavailable Toluene

Water pollution is one of the most important problems for human beings. BTEX (Benzene, Toluene, Ethylbenzene and Xylenes) have vast application in industry and their carcinogenic effect on human body has approved. Hence these part of water pollutants (water-soluble aromatic components) have more importance. Monitoring systems that can detect presence of BTEX in water supplies are much expensive such as gas chromatography so we need simple systems to reduce the number of samples that we are suspected to them for more analysis by much more expensive systems. Bioreporters are a subgroup of biosensors which are using for sensing and monitoring some signals or reagents. A bioreporter is an organism like a bacteria or a plant that is genetically manipulated to have a promoter which is sensitive to a chemical or physical signal. Activation of the promoter In presense of the signal leads to product of the reporter gene which can be sensed or calculated by our laboratory supplies. A green fluorescent protein gene has been used as a reporter gene downstream of PtbuA1 as a BTEX sensitive promoter in Escherichia coli and its response to BTEX has been investigated in this study. Our results show our bioreporter can sense Toluene.The optimum time and temperature for the bioreporter is also defined.