Different bacterial host-basedluxreporter array for fast identification and toxicity indication of multiple metal ions

Although luminescent bacteria-based bioluminescence inhibition assay has been widely used in the toxicity assessment of environmental pollutants, the response of a luminescent bacterium usually lacks specificity to a target analyte. Recently, some specific analyte inductive promoters were fused to theluxgenes for the purpose of selective bioluminescent sensing, and suits of specific promoters were fused toluxgenes to compose a bioluminescent array sensor for simultaneous identification of multiple analytes. However, specific promoter-based methods still suffer from drawbacks including limited selectivity, slow responding time, expensive to construct different promoters involved plasmids, and laborious to find new promoters. Herein, we proposed a novel strategy to construct aluxreporter array sensor by directly transforming the naturalluxgenes in different bacterial hosts without the involvement of any specific promoters. Due to the distinct pathways of signal production, the responding time of the current different bacterial host (DBH)-basedluxreporter array has nearly an order of magnitude faster than with specific promoter-based methods. The DBH-basedluxreporter array was successfully used for simultaneous identification, quantification, and toxicity/bioactivity assessment of multiple metal ions. Obviously, all the chemical synthetic material-based metal ion sensing methods cannot simultaneously achieve analysis and toxicity evaluation. This approach possessed additional advantages of facile construction, easy operation, high selectivity, fast response, and strong adaptability to other analytes.