Over the last years a huge amount of biosensors to detect the most abundant harmful substances were created. Most of these are not used as real world applications. All of these systems alone provide the possibility to detect one substance at a time. Combining them would have the potential to generate a test strip for a spectrum of substances which would provide a whole pollution profile.
We aimed to provide a general design to make most biosensorscompatibleto our test system.
To show this principle we choose to detect heavy metals which are still a major problem all over the world and include many former iGEM projects. Some good characterized sensors as well as basic ideas for sensor designs, by modifying these already existing systems and creating a new one we showed that a general concept enables the construction of a test strip for many substances in parallel.
In addition to these heavy metal sensors we tackled a local problem. In our area date rape drug intoxications present a huge problem which should not be underestimated. Therefore we created a sensor to detect date rape drug residues .
While working on this topic we became aware of the dual use difficulty concerning knowledge provided these systems. Because this is of importance to the whole iGEM community and there are no guide lines jet we decided to write a report concerning the dual use topic.
In short: We optimized already existing heavy metal sensors to work in a general modular system, added a new heavy metal sensor based on the same idea, created a sensor for date rape drugs, gave insight into the dual use scenario and provided the practical approaches to our cell free test strip.
For further details concerning our cell free realization check our biosensor design