Paper Title
Carotenoids as Bioreporter For Environmental Toxicants Assessment: A Spectrometry Approach
Abstract
Environmental pollution is a global crisis due to the anthropogenic activities. Conventional chemical analytical
tools and biosensors are effective tools in environmental toxicant assessment. For whole cell biosensors, chlorophyll was a
well-studied pigment as bioreporter for the presence of environmental toxicants, but other pigments were not widely
reported. In this paper, the usage of another widespread photosynthetic pigments- carotenoids as bioreporter of
environmental toxicant is discussed through a few possible biosensor designs, with the sensitivity, reproducibility and
storability evaluated. The carotenoids are found to be good candidate as bioreporters as the pigments response was
acceptable with dosage dependency. However, the storability was still an issue which a better immobilization or storage
condition was the key to a better results.
Keywords- Carotenoids, environmental pollutants, bioindicator, photosynthetic organisms.