Research of marine isolates in development of biosensors for environmental pollutants
Abstract
Bioluminescence is a phenomenon exhibited by various organisms like marine bacteria, glow worms, fireflies, anglerfish, jelly fish, etc. These organisms can produce and emit light. Bioluminescence is a natural process of energy release in the form of emitted light. The organisms produce chemicals, luciferin, which is a pigment and an enzyme luciferase. Luciferin reacts with oxygen to release energy in the form of light with the help of enzyme luciferase. The reaction requires energy in the form of ATP. In bacteria, the bioluminescence is controlled by a set of genes called Lux operon. In the present work Vibrio spps. have been isolated from the surface of fresh squids. The bioluminescence exhibited by these bacteria was quantitated using the luminescence mode of the spectrophotometer. The bioluminescence exhibited by the bacteria was studied during its growth and found to be a maximum of 30 hours. The circadian cycle exhibited by these bacteria was also studied. The bioluminescence was observed to decrease in the presence of water pollutants like heavy metal ions, complex aromatic hydrocarbons and pesticides. Since the genes (lux operon) controlling bioluminescence are sensitive to presence of pollutants, the construction of biosensors using these genes could have great application.Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Engineering review uses the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International License, which governs the use, publishing and distribution of articles by authors, publishers and the wider general public.
The authors are allowed to post a digital file of the published article, or the link to the published article (Enginering Review web page) may be made publicly available on websites or repositories, such as the Author’s personal website, preprint servers, university networks or primary employer’s institutional websites, third party institutional or subject-based repositories, and conference websites that feature presentations by the Author(s) based on the published article, under the condition that the article is posted in its unaltered Engineering Review form, exclusively for non-commercial purposes.
The journal Engineering Review’s publishing procedure is performed in accordance with the publishing ethics statements, defined within the Publishing Ethics Resource Kit. The Ethics statement is available in the document Ethics Policies.