Aromatics Scouts

A Comprehensive Biosensor Toolkit to Profile Aromatics in Environment

Aromatic pollutants are becoming a worldwide concern. Monitoring aromatics in the environment, however, remains a substantial challenge. Noting the power of biosensors to enable quick and convenient testing, Peking iGEM have developed a novel biosensor toolkit to profile aromatics in environment. Transcriptional regulators that each senses a specific class of aromatics were first bioinformatically determined; they were then utilized to build a comprehensive set of biosensor circuits. Characterization on the detection profiles of individual biosensors and their orthogonality/crosstalk prove that these biosensors are high-performance.

Moreover, for the ease of practical applications, two types of genetic devices were also developed as plug-ins for biosensors: "Adaptors", a set of conceptually novel devices to convert undetectable chemicals into detectable aromatics, and "Band-pass Filter", a "concentration filter" that allows the detection of analyte concentration within a specific range.