A novel toxicity fingerprinting method for pollutant identification with lux-marked biosensors

At present, monitoring and identification of environmental pollutants in freshwater is performed predominantly by laboratory-based chemical analysis. Such an approach is often time-consuming and expensive and requires prior knowledge of the pollutants present for most practical purposes, because chemical identification techniques are generally specific to individual pollutants or pollutant classes [3]. In addition, total pollutant load does not always accurately reflect environmental toxicity because pollutant bioavailability is dependent upon water chemistry. For these reasons, a movement is increasing toward the use of biological techniques for the monitoring of environmental pollution by industry and regulators alike [2].