
Bacteria That Can Help Find Land Mines - lnguyen
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bacteria-that-can-help-find-land-mines-1492786346
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jfarlow
The various compounds released by the (organic (containing carbon)) explosives
can be metabolized by bacteria. And bacterial metabolism is often linked to
sensors within the bacteria already - so that the machinery for metabolizing X
isn't actually produced unless the bacteria can sense X in its environment. If
we find a bacteria that already has this system, we can commandeer it so that
upon sensing TNT/DNT/Nitrates it produces a reporter (color, it moves, another
sense-able chemical) instead of or along with the enzymes used to metabolize
those explosive materials.

A list of tested analytes and reporters:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625088/table/T...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625088/table/T1/)

And a very basic diagram:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625088/figure/...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625088/figure/F1/)

And images of what the bacteria look like when 'turned on' by TNT, DNT, or
nitrates:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625088/figure/...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625088/figure/F1/)

[From the paper:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625088/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625088/)
]

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dazhbog
Article with no paywall

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