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Simultaneous detection of bioavailable arsenic and cadmium in contaminated soils using dual-sensing bioreporters

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Abstract

Whole-cell bioreporters (WCBs) have attracted increasing attention during the last few decades because they allow fast determination of bioavailable heavy metals in contaminated sites. Various WCBs to monitor specific heavy metals such as arsenic and cadmium in diverse environmental systems are available. However, currently, no study on simultaneous analysis of arsenic and cadmium has been reported, even though soils are contaminated by diverse heavy metals and metalloids. We demonstrated herein the development of dual-sensing WCBs to simultaneously quantify bioavailable arsenic and cadmium in contaminated sites by employing the promoter regions of the ars and znt operons as separate metal-sensing domains, and egfp and mcherry as reporter genes. The dual-sensing WCBs were generated by inserting two sets of genes into E. coli DH5α. The capability of WCBs was successfully proved to simultaneously quantify bioavailable arsenic and cadmium in amended Landwirtschaftliche Untersuchungs und Forschungsanstalt (LUFA) soils, and then, it was applied to contaminated field soils collected from a smelter area in Korea. As a result, it was noticed that the bioavailable portion of cadmium was higher than that of arsenic while the absolute amount of bioavailable arsenic and cadmium level was opposite. Since both cadmium and arsenic were assessed from the same E. coli cells, the data obtained by using dual-sensing WCBs would be more efficient and convenient than that from comparative WCB assay. In spite of advantageous aspects, to our knowledge, this is the first report on a dual-sensing WCB for rapid and concurrent quantification of bioavailable arsenic and cadmium in contaminated soils.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Korean Ministry of the Environment as a GAIA Project (2014000560001); the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT, & Future Planning (2015 A0020074); and the Ministry of Education (2013R1A1A2061386).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Health Science, Konkuk University, Seoul, 05029, South Korea

    Youngdae Yoon, Sunghoon Kim, Yooeun Chae, Shin Woong Kim, Yerin Kang & Youn-Joo An

  2. Department of Environmental Engineering, Kunsan National University, Kunsan, 54150, South Korea

    Gyeonghyeon An & Seung-Woo Jeong

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  1. Youngdae Yoon
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  2. Sunghoon Kim
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  3. Yooeun Chae
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  4. Shin Woong Kim
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Correspondence to Youn-Joo An.

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All applicable international, national, and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed. This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Conflict of interest

Youngdae Yoon declares that he has no conflict of interest. Sunghoon Kim declares that he has no conflict of interest. Yooeun Chae declares that she has no conflict of interest. Shin Woong Kim declares that he has no conflict of interest. Yerin Kang declares that she has no conflict of interest. Seung-Woo Jeong declares that he has no conflict of interest. Youn-Joo An declares that she has no conflict of interest.

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Yoon, Y., Kim, S., Chae, Y. et al. Simultaneous detection of bioavailable arsenic and cadmium in contaminated soils using dual-sensing bioreporters. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 100, 3713–3722 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-016-7338-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-016-7338-6

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