Self-Powered Biosensor for Water Toxicity Monitoring

Contamination of water supplies with toxic industrial chemicals (TICs) is a major concern for the U.S. military due to their worldwide prevalence and accessibility. Traditional, analyte-specific approaches are unfeasible to detect the approximately 70,000 potential TIC contaminants. Biologically-based sensors have the potential to provide general information on whether a water source is contaminated and to be sensitive to a wide variety of toxicants. However, currently biologically-based sensors suffer from several disadvantages, including poor sensitivity to a wide enough variety of toxins, and are too large or unstable for practical field deployable devices. Lynntech proposes the development of a novel sensing device using an enzymatic biofuel cell (BFC) as a self-powered biosensor for detecting toxins in water. Advantages include detection of diverse toxins in water with appropriate sensitivity, simple and fast operation, compact, and low power requirements. Lynntech in collaboration with the University of New Mexico is utilizing a novel enzyme immobilization approach to greatly extend the life of the BFC-based biosensors under harsh storage and operational conditions. During the Phase I, Lynntech successfully developed and tested enzyme-based water toxicity sensors. During the Phase II, hand-held prototype toxicity sensors will be designed, fabricated, tested, and delivered to the Army.