Environmental contamination by heavy metals is a worldwide problem. The leading sources for heavy metal contamination occur from mining, smelting, corrosions, waste disposal, fossil fuel combustion, and agrochemicals and sewage sludge application. The current remediation techniques of heavy metal from the environment are expensive, time consuming, and environmentally destructive. The development of an alternative system for monitoring heavy metal pollution to include the use of genetically engineered bacteria could be faster and less expensive than current methods. Here we report on the ability to use an aquamarine variant of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) as a biosensor for the detection of specific heavy metals. While the fluorescence from GFPs is relatively insensitive to most environmental conditions when the chromophore is excited directly, FRET from endogenous Tyr and Trp residues to the chromophore has been shown to be much more sensitive to quenching. In this presentation we report the effects of quenching of UV-excited aquamarine by various heavy metal ions.

Detection of heavy metal ions using green fluorescent protein biosensors by quenching FRET from endogenous aromatic amino acids

249th National Meeting (2015)

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