Patent ID: 8551921

Claim:
A method for determining toxicity of an environmental or chemical sample containing potentially toxic chemical compounds, comprising: (i) providing an array of at least three different microorganisms in a multi-well plate, wherein the at least three different microorganisms freeze dried are each separately present in at least four wells of a set of wells; (ii) adding growth media and an indicator that changes color due to the growth of the microorganism to the microorganisms in the multi-well plate and exposing each of the at least three different microorganisms in the set of wells to a known concentration gradient of the sample, while leaving a well of the set of wells unexposed to the sample; (iii) incubating the array of microorganisms; (iv) measuring growth of each of the at least three different microorganisms in each well; (v) within each set of wells, comparing the measured growth of the microorganism in each well exposed to the sample to the measured growth of the microorganism in the well unexposed to the sample; (vi) calculating a toxic concentration (TC) value for each microorganism and assembling the calculated TC values into a toxic fingerprint of the sample, wherein the toxic fingerprint comprises the TC value of each microorganism; (vii) comparing the toxic fingerprint of the sample to a reference toxic fingerprint for reference chemicals having known toxicity, the reference toxic fingerprint having been generated from a same said at least three microorganisms; (viii) calculating a correlation coefficient between the toxic fingerprint of the sample and each of the reference toxic fingerprints; and (ix) determining the toxicity of the sample based on the correlation coefficient having a highest value in step (viii).