Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, awarded its 2023 Future Insight Prize to Khalid Salaita, professor of chemistry at Emory University. The award comes with $540,000 to fund the next phase of research into an air sensor that can continuously monitor indoor spaces for pathogens that can cause pandemics.
Merck Prize boosts work on automated air sensor for pandemic pathogens sciencex.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sciencex.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A safer way to deploy bacteria as environmental sensors scienceblog.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from scienceblog.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Credits: Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT
Previous image
Next image
In recent years, scientists have developed many strains of engineered bacteria that can be used as sensors to detect environmental contaminants such as heavy metals. If deployed in the natural environment, these sensors could help scientists track how pollutant levels change over time, over a wide geographic area.
MIT engineers have now devised a way to make this kind of deployment safer, by encasing bacterial sensors in a tough hydrogel shell that prevents them from escaping into the environment and potentially spreading modified genes to other organisms.
“Right now there are a lot of whole-cell biosensors being developed, but applying them in the real world is a challenge because we don’t want any genetically modified organisms to be able to exchange genetic material with wild-type microbes,” says MIT graduate student Tzu-Chieh Tang, one of the lead authors of the new stu