Nanowatt Circuit Interface To Whole-Cell Bacterial Sensors

In this work we designed a nanowatt-level readout system for bioluminescence measurements from bacterial cells. The system achieves 600 nJ/conversion from external NPN phototransistors with an effective photon noise flux of 5.3 × 10⁵ ph/mm². The system can successfully detect bioluminescence produced by engineered heavy-metal sensing bacteria using 4.0 × 10⁶ cells in 15 µL of sample.