Aromatics Scouts

A Comprehensive Biosensor Toolkit to Profile Aromatics in the Environment

Monitoring aromatic compounds in the environment remains a substantial challenge today. Noting the power of biosensors for quick and convenient testing, Peking iGEM has developed a functionally comprehensive biosensor toolkit to profile aromatics in the 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 really high-performance to profile aromatics in water.

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.

We expect that these novel biosensors, together with the plug-in devices, will serve as intriguing synthetic biological tools for diverse practical applications.