Aromatics Scouts

A Comprehensive Biosensor Toolkit to Profile Aromatics in Environment

There are numerous classes of prokaryotes lives in the aromatics-rich environment. Part of them possess aromatic degradation pathways, and also transcriptional factors to monitor the environmental aromatics, and control degradation pathway to balance the degradation capacity. Peking iGEM team mainly focused on the various transcriptional factors, which can respond to various aromatic inducers. We characterized these biosensors and improve their performance by using well-characterized biobricks. We expanded the detection range by coupling enzymes in upper pathways and biosensors to degrade aromatics to detectable compounds. For quantitative detection, we construct the band pass filter to detect a certain range of concentration. The appliance of microfluidics may construct a concentration gradient, and a certain concentration’s response can reflect the original concentration of environmental samples. With the application of this device, we can achieve easy and quantitative detection of environmental aromatics, and at the same time, remarkably enrich the library of inducible biosensors.