The Qube: Our multiplexed sensor can detect a suite of contaminants continuously in harsh environments
Water Quality Sensors
The Qube is an innovative sensor platform that uses engineered bacteria to quantify contaminants in water at low concentrations.
What are the advantages of this platform?
Continuous, automated sensing
Customizable sensor chips to detect desired targets
Reduce labor and increase sampling frequency
Field-tested: we have deployed the Qube in harsh environments
What are your sensing needs?
We can develop and add new capabilities for your needs.
Contact us for more information.
Water Quality Monitoring:
As global freshwater supplies become impacted, water quality is an increasingly critical concern. Human activity has introduced toxins, including heavy metals and excessive nutrients, into many natural water supplies across the globe. We use a combination of native cellular pathways and synthetic biology techniques to engineer bacteria that produce measurable responses in the presence of a wide range of toxins.
Our process combines this synthetic biology with microfluidic technology and computational classification to develop a highly sensitive and specific platform for sensing contaminants in water. We use microfluidics to integrate many independent sensor strains within a self-contained platform that can continuously monitor water supplies for contamination. Our device consists of an array of cell strain chambers connected in parallel, each supporting the long-term culturing of an individual sensor strain. We then use machine learning models to correlate the sensor responses with a quantitative measure of a specific toxin’s concentration. The flexibility of our approach provides a framework for future expansion and customization.