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Review
. 2020 Oct:177:106059.
doi: 10.1016/j.mimet.2020.106059. Epub 2020 Sep 15.

Microbial biosensors for recreational and source waters

H D Alan Lindquist  1
Affiliations
Review

Microbial biosensors for recreational and source waters

H D Alan Lindquist. J Microbiol Methods. 2020 Oct.

Abstract

Biosensors are finding new places in science, and the growth of this technology will lead to dramatic improvements in the ability to detect microorganisms in recreational and source waters for the protection of public health. Much of the improvement in biosensors has followed developments in molecular biology processes and coupling these with advances in engineering. Progress in the fields of nano-engineering and materials science have opened many new avenues for biosensors. The adaptation of these diverse technological fields into sensors has been driven by the need to develop more rapid sensors that are highly accurate, sensitive and specific, and have other desirable properties, such as robust deployment capability, unattended operations, and remote data transfer. The primary challenges to the adoption of biosensors in recreational and source water applications are cost of ownership, particularly operations and maintenance costs, problems caused by false positive rates, and to a lesser extent false negative rates, legacy technologies, policies and practices which will change as biosensors improve to the point of replacing more traditional methods for detecting organisms in environmental samples.

Keywords: Biosensor; Microbiology; Microorganism; Recreational water; Source water.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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