A portable bioelectronic sensing system (BESSY) for environmental deployment incorporating differential microbial sensing in miniaturized reactors

Alyssa Y Zhou; Moshe Baruch; Caroline M Ajo-Franklin; Michel M Maharbiz

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0184994

A portable bioelectronic sensing system (BESSY) for environmental deployment incorporating differential microbial sensing in miniaturized reactors

PLoS One. 2017 Sep 15;12(9):e0184994. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184994. eCollection 2017.

Authors

Alyssa Y Zhou^{1

2}, Moshe Baruch², Caroline M Ajo-Franklin^{2

3}, Michel M Maharbiz^{1

4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
² Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
³ Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
⁴ Department of Bioengineering, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
⁵ Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco, California, United States of America.

Abstract

Current technologies are lacking in the area of deployable, in situ monitoring of complex chemicals in environmental applications. Microorganisms metabolize various chemical compounds and can be engineered to be analyte-specific making them naturally suited for robust chemical sensing. However, current electrochemical microbial biosensors use large and expensive electrochemistry equipment not suitable for on-site, real-time environmental analysis. Here we demonstrate a miniaturized, autonomous bioelectronic sensing system (BESSY) suitable for deployment for instantaneous and continuous sensing applications. We developed a 2x2 cm footprint, low power, two-channel, three-electrode electrochemical potentiostat which wirelessly transmits data for on-site microbial sensing. Furthermore, we designed a new way of fabricating self-contained, submersible, miniaturized reactors (m-reactors) to encapsulate the bacteria, working, and counter electrodes. We have validated the BESSY's ability to specifically detect a chemical amongst environmental perturbations using differential current measurements. This work paves the way for in situ microbial sensing outside of a controlled laboratory environment.

MeSH terms

Bioreactors*
Biosensing Techniques* / instrumentation
Biosensing Techniques* / methods
Electrochemical Techniques* / instrumentation
Electrochemical Techniques* / methods
Environmental Monitoring* / instrumentation
Environmental Monitoring* / methods
Shewanella / metabolism*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research (N000141310551) and performed at the Molecular Foundry and UC Berkeley. Work at the Molecular Foundry was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.