Centre for Synthetic and Systems Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH9 3FF, UK.
Hangzhou Innovation Center, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 311200, China.
Microb Biotechnol. 2021 Nov;14(6):2334-2342. doi: 10.1111/1751-7915.13820. Epub 2021 May 7.
Synthetic biology offers new tools and capabilities of engineering cells with desired functions for example as new biosensing platforms leveraging engineered microbes. In the last two decades, bacterial cells have been programmed to sense and respond to various input cues for versatile purposes including environmental monitoring, disease diagnosis and adaptive biomanufacturing. Despite demonstrated proof-of-concept success in the laboratory, the real-world applications of microbial sensors have been restricted due to certain technical and societal limitations. Yet, most limitations can be addressed by new technological developments in synthetic biology such as circuit design, biocontainment and machine learning. Here, we summarize the latest advances in synthetic biology and discuss how they could accelerate the development, enhance the performance and address the present limitations of microbial sensors to facilitate their use in the field. We view that programmable living sensors are promising sensing platforms to achieve sustainable, affordable and easy-to-use on-site detection in diverse settings.
合成生物学提供了新的工具和能力，可以设计具有期望功能的细胞，例如利用工程微生物作为新的生物传感平台。在过去的二十年中，细菌细胞已经被编程为感知和响应各种输入提示，用于各种用途，包括环境监测、疾病诊断和自适应生物制造。尽管在实验室中已经证明了概念验证的成功，但由于某些技术和社会限制，微生物传感器的实际应用受到了限制。然而，通过合成生物学中的新技术发展，如电路设计、生物控制和机器学习，可以解决大多数限制。在这里，我们总结了合成生物学的最新进展，并讨论了它们如何加速微生物传感器的发展、提高性能和解决当前的限制，以促进它们在该领域的应用。我们认为可编程活体传感器是很有前途的传感平台，可以在各种环境中实现可持续、经济实惠且易于使用的现场检测。
