AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY Exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), compounds that interfere with native hormonal receptors, has been associated with everything from obesity to cancer. EDCs are present in a variety of consumer products—bisphenol A (BPA), for example, can be found in some plastic containers. Although these compounds are not trivial to find, last month (January 11) in ACS Central Science, a team at the University of California, Berkeley, reported on a new method for detection, which it developed using Escherichia coli bacteria.
“There are many [endocrine-disrupting] compounds found in the environment now due to pollution, fracking and other kinds of industrial processes,” said study coauthor Ariel Furst, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. These compounds “can have [a] detrimental effect on health, leading to diseases and [other] problems,” she added.
E. coli cells naturally express estrogen receptors on their surfaces. Taking advantage of this, Furst and colleagues created an “electrochemical sandwich assay” with two components: freeze-dried bacteria that had been engineered to display estrogen receptors on their surfaces and disposable electrodes, which the researchers modified with proteins that bind to the estrogen receptor only when EDCs are present. “The way the electrochemical technique works is that it basically just measures how much of your surface is blocked,” ...
