Institute for Materials and Processes
Seminar Series
Thursday, 15 October 2009
13:00 Sanderson, Drawing Office North
12:45 pizza, plus coffee & tea: Sanderson coffee room (first floor)
Dr. Alistair Elfick & the IGEM 2009 team
University of Edinburgh
“Defusing a dangerous world:
a biological method for detection of landmines”
Landmines left over from past conflicts are a major hazard in the world, killing and
maiming many people every year. We have sought to engineer a bacterium able to detect
TNT and its degradation products, nitrites, in the environment. Our system is based around
a previously published computationally designed TNT-sensing protein derived from the
periplasmic ribose binding protein, which interacts with an EnvZ- Trg transmembrane
hybrid fusion protein and a nitrite-responsive repressor to trigger a pathway of TNT
degradation and visualization using combined output from a bacterial luciferase and Yellow
Fluorescent Protein. We envisage that the detection system could be applied by spraying
the organism on soil where the presence of landmines is suspected, and detecting
luminescence using low-light sensing. Once located, the mines could be safely removed.
This system could be extended to detect other analytes in the environment.