The capability to identify contaminants in water in field-forward, resource-poor environments remains important, both for deployed soldiers and impoverished people. Both nature and bioengineers have generated biosensors that respond to all kinds of analytes, including those relevant to drinking water such as heavy metals, toxic compounds, and pathogens; however, deployment of these sensors often remains a technical challenge. For cell-based sensors, these challenges include keeping the cells alive and complications due to cell behavior in different conditions such as temperature or components of a sample. One approach to address these issues is the use of cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) systems freeze-dried onto paper tickets. In this way, the addition of a water sample rehydrates the CFPS, which then produces a colorimetric reporter gene in response to the presence of the target analyte. In this work, we demonstrate this technology for a panel of heavy metals, including limits of detection and specificity for each metal. These paper-based sensors are cheap, disposable, simple to use, and multiplexible. While the focus here is on heavy metals, the approach can be expanded to detect a wider range of contaminants including toxic compounds and pathogens.

Paper-based gene network detection of heavy metals for in-field water quality testing

2019 Fall National Meeting

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