Bacterial Sensors

Jan Roelof van der Meer is Associate Professor in Environmental Microbiology at the Department of Fundamental Microbiology of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He joined the University of Lausanne in 2003, after spending ten years as Group Leader at the Swiss Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag). He completed a MSc degree in Environmental Sciences from the Wageningen Agricultural University (The Netherlands), and holds a PhD degree of the same university specializing in molecular microbiology. Before joining Eawag he was postdoctoral fellow at the Dutch National Dairy Institute. His primary field of interest concerns the many-fold interactions of bacteria with chemical pollutants in the environment. In ongoing research his group actively pursues the evolutionary mechanisms underlying adaptation of bacteria to using organic pollutants as unique carbon and energy sources. Another part of his research focuses on pollutant degradation by bacteria in the environment.A third activity of his group concentrates on the design, construction and application of bacterial bioreporters for environmental quality measurements, which is the topic of this lecture. Dr. van der Meer coordinates the FP7 large integrated European project BACSIN on bacterial survival and adaptation in the environment. Before that he served as coordinator of the FP7 project FACEiT, which focused on biology-based detection tools for environmental quality assessment.

• Short History of the use of Bacteria for Biosensing and Bioreporting.- Genetic Engineering Concepts.- Measuring with Bioreporters.- Epilogue.