Field test kits can detect high levels of arsenic but are typically unreliable at lower concentrations of concern for human health. Reliability of field methods is yet to be fully evaluated.
Guidelines for drinking-water quality, 2nd ed.Geneva, World Health Organization, 1996.
Brown IGEM's project drew inspiration from the 2007 Brown IGEM Team's Lead Sensor Project. The problem of water contamination throughout the world motivated us to broaden our project to other toxins rather than just Lead. Arsenic, Mercury, and Lead can all be detected with our simple genetic construct. More importantly is the sensitivity of the design. One of the goals of the summer was to keep the bacterial solution small. We started with larger bacterial solutions and gradually decreased the volume so that our electrical biosensor would be able to work with just a fraction of a milliliter of contaminated water. The Brown IGEM Biosensor provides a sensitive detection method that is also portable, simple to reproduce and cheap to manufacture.
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