Engineered E. coli can monitor arsenic, offering a cheap biosensor

Cornell scientists have engineered E. coli to act as a sensitive biosensor for monitoring environmental arsenic, a toxic pollutant most notably found in rice paddies in Southeast Asia. Their new study provides a proof of principle for a potentially cheap living sensor that can record even transient arsenic exposure under anaerobic conditions, preserve this information in the genome and allow delayed readout later in the open air of the lab.