Engineering Bacterial Biosensor through Synthetic Biology Design

The genome of organisms consists of rules which dictate to cell how to eat, reproduce, communicate, move and interact with their environment. These rules can be rewritten by exploiting principles of synthetic genetic circuits found in rapidly evolving discipline of synthetic biology in order to engineer bacterial cells that produce a novel desired artificial function.

The cells change their gene expression patterns in response to different environmental conditions such as pH, temperature, oxygen concentration or UV light, which turn on sensing systems that bacteria naturally have. Therefore, they are excellent candidates for detecting environmental changes.

To date, the bacterial biosensors has mainly based on triggering a single stress-responsive promoter that is fused to reporter protein within the same living cell. However, this approach has failed to deal with complexity found in real-world samples, which are more challenging to deal with than those taken in laboratory.

Therefore, we will implement competitive promoter, negative feedback (NF) and different stress promoters in analog-digital design for building whole-cell bacterial biosensor that will identify the presence of various toxicants in water.