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Sensor100
February 2016
30
Fluorescent biosensors light up high-throughput meta-
bolic engineering
Synthetic biologists are learning to turn microbes and
unicellular organisms into highly productive factories
by re-engineering their metabolism to produce valued
commodities such as fine chemicals, therapeutics and
biofuels.To speed up identification of the most efficient
producers, researchers at Harvard’sWyss Institute for
Biologically Inspired Engineering describe new ap-
proaches to this process and demonstrate how geneti-
cally encoded fluorescent biosensors can enable the
generation and testing of billions of individual variants
of a metabolic pathway in record time.
“Our fluorescent biosensors are built around special-
ized proteins that directly sense commercially valuable
metabolites.These sensor proteins switch on the ex-
pression of a fluorescent reporter protein, resulting in
cellular brightness that is proportional to the amount
of chemical produced within the engineered cells.We
can literally watch the biological production of valuable
chemicals in real-time as the synthesis occurs and iso-
late the highest producers out of cultures with billions
of candidates,” said Jameson Rogers, who was named
one of Forbes’ “30 Under 30” in Science for opening new perspectives in bioengineer-
ing.
Reported by:
EurekAlert! 17 February
IMAGE: Genetically encoded
fluorescent biosensors allow
researchers to follow prod-
uct accumulation in individ-
ual bacteria in real time and
to filter the best producers
out of cultures with billions
of bacteria
Credit: Wyss Institute at
Harvard University.