Abstract
 
Oil contamination has been one of the most common environmental pollution due to its threat to both human health and
ecosystems. It is difficult for the application of conventional chemical analysis to detect oil contamination in-situ, estimate
bioavailability and rapidly assess the environmental risk. In this study, two bioreporters were employed for the rapid and direct
detection of oil content and genotoxicity in a cutting oil contaminated site in China. Acinetobacter baylyi ADPWH_alk and
ADPWH_recA are chromosomally-based bioreporter for the detection of alkanes and genotoxicity separately. The reporter gene
cluster luxCDABE enabled cells to express bioluminescence in the presence of contaminants. Calibration curve of bioreporter
response to oil in the soils illustrated a log-log linear relationship between oil content and bioluminescence expression, indicating
that whole cell bioreporter can be used as a semi-quantitative analysis method to estimate the oil contamination. The oil
contamination in soils detected by ADPWH_alk (5760 and 1090 mg/kg) were comparable with those obtained by GC/MS (7070
and 1490 mg/kg). Furthermore, the genotoxicity bioreporter ADPWH_recA showed that the ecological genotoxicity of the soil
samples were equivalent to 33-36 mg mitomycin C per kilogram soils. The results suggested that bioreporter sensing could be a
rapid, simple, low-costly and in-situ detection method with unique ability for the detection of toxicity and bioavailability, and it
can be a useful and complementary tool to chemical analysis.