Aromatics Scouts

A Comprehensive Biosensor Toolkit to Profile Aromatics in Environment

Aromatic pollutants are becoming a worldwide concern. Monitoring aromatics in environment, however, remains a substantial challenge. Using the abundant genomic data from prokaryotes living in aromatics-rich environment, Peking iGEM have developed a "Biobrick-Mining“ method to mine a comprehensive set of transcriptional-regulator-based biosensors for aromatics. The transcriptional regulators for each typical class of organic compounds were first bioinformatically determined and then utilized to build biosensor circuits in bacterial cells. Genetic tailoring such as promoter engineering was performed to tune their properties functionally. Each of these novel biosensors proved to be capable of faithfully sensing a specific group of aromatics. Furthermore, the orthogonality/crosstalk of their detection profiles was carefully examined; this allowed the combination of these biosensors to profile aromatics in environment for the ease of practical applications.

Additionally, for the ease of detection, we have constructed a band-pass filter to detect a specific range of concentration. Responses of biosensors equipped with band-pass filter can robustly reflect the concentration of environmental samples.

In conclusion, Peking iGEM has remarkably enriched the library of biosensors for aromatics and enabled quantitative in situ detection for environmental monitoring. These biosensors as well-characterized synthetic biological tools, we expect, will be also intriguing for metabolic engineering, such as metabolic process control.