A Microfluidic Biosensor Platform for Real-Time Water Monitoring

Access to clean, reliable water supplies is critical to our quality of life and our economy, yet across the country thousands of hazardous waste sites are so heavily contaminated that the un- derlying groundwater doesn’t meet drinking water standards- Measuring contamination in the environment is critical to human health and to understanding complex subsurface systems, but current testing is mostly limited to sporadic sample collection for laboratory analysis- Not only is this process costly, but it is inefficient, making it difficult to monitor groundwater with high spa-tial or temporal resolution-As a result, current methods often do not capture the full complexityof how contaminants behave in the environment- The main objective of this SBIR proposal is to develop a customizable biosensor platform that uses flu- orescent microbial sensor strains to continuously monitor water for contaminants of interest- Given the priorities of the DOE Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program, our goal for this proposal will be to demonstrate technical feasibility by quantitatively detecting several of the most ubiquitous contaminants in groundwater:arsenic, cadmium, nitrogen, and phosphorus-Several of theBER focus areas could benefit from networks of real-time nutrient and contaminant sensors that would enable spacial and temporal mapping of water quality- For example, the Subsurface Bio- geochemistry Research Program states that one of the knowledge gaps is to understand the “roleof subsurface interaction zone processes in modulating the flux of contaminants and nutrients be- tween groundwater and surface water-”