Organic Contaminant Detection and Biodegradation Characteristics

Catabolism of organic compounds has been extensively described in the literature (1 ). Many different compounds can be utilized as carbon and energy sources by bacteria, including aliphatics and aromatics, both man-made and natural. Very often these compounds will be broken down to useable intermediates by a set of genes that are coordinately regulated by an operon. The advantage to the cell is that these specialized catabolic genes will only be expressed when the substrate is present, i.e., they are induced in the presence of the substrate. We have used this mducibility to form genetic fusions of the lux gene and catabolic genes of interest.