PFI (MCA): High-Throughput Portable Biosensors for Detecting Toxins and Monitoring Health

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation – Mid Career Advancement (PFI-MCA) project will be the development of a new biosensor that has the capability to detect known and emerging environmental toxins and threats. A major advantage of this biosensor is that it will have the potential to detect toxins that have never before been characterized.

Examples include emerging biowarfare agents, nanotechnology pollutants, novel toxins produced by fungi and yeast, and chemical poisons. The new biosensor will work by housing living microbial reporter cells, and monitoring their reactions to their environment in real-time. The types of responses observed in the reporter cells will help identity the toxin or threat within minutes.

This new technology can be a first line of detection for guarding the public health, including food and water supplies.

The project will help develop the new biosensor by monitoring the responses of specialized microbial reporter cells to their environment using surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). The reporter cell responses will be measured when exposed several chemical, nanotechnology, and biological toxins in this project. This will be done in the presence of several biochemical additives that will guide the cells to respond in different ways to different toxins.

Cell responses will be monitored by SERS using a portable field-deployable instrument. Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) models will be constructed to map reporter cell responses to the type of toxin exposure. In addition to the toxins mentioned above, the biosensor will be tested on a library of banked drinking and river water samples to determine if it can detect previously measured contaminants. Following its development, efforts will be made to commercialize the new biosensor.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.