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. 2021 Jun 29;11:13516. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-92878-6

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Engineered Hg(II) whole-cell biosensor based on MerR-regulated visual violacein production. The archetype of natural mer operon originated from E. coli is shown at the bottom of the figure. To assemble Hg(II)-responsive visual biosensor, the mercury detoxification gene cluster merTPCAD was substituted with the violacein biosynthetic gene cluster vioABCDE. The violacein biosynthetic module, originated from Chromobacterium violaceum, is transcriptionally regulated by the Hg(II) sensing element to enable a whole-cell violacein-based Hg(II) biosensor. The violacein, produced with bioavailable Hg(II) induction, can be extracted with organic solvents such as butanol, and quantified by a microplate reader at 490 nm.