The advances and future potential of bacterial whole-cell biosensors

Synthetic (or engineering) biology is a discipline that focuses not only on understanding living systems but also on building and engineering those systems. By modifying genetic material, proteins, or other metabolites, researchers can give cells new functions, allowing them to behave in ways that do not occur naturally. By applying iterative engineering principles through repeated cycles of design, build, test, and learning, these engineered tools can be progressively improved. In practice, this commonly means taking regions of DNA with well-understood functions and assembling them inside living cells. Genetic “parts” can then be combined to give cells new capabilities, with ever-increasing complexity and precision over how and when those functions are activated.