Fluorescent biosensors light up high-throughput metabolic engineering
Wednesday, February 17, 2016 - 14:27
in Biology & Nature
Synthetic biologists are learning to turn microbes and unicellular organisms into highly productive factories by re-engineering their metabolism to produce valued commodities such as fine chemicals, therapeutics and biofuels. To speed up identification of the most efficient producers, researchers describe new approaches to this process and demonstrate how genetically encoded fluorescent biosensors can enable the generation and testing of billions of individual variants of a metabolic pathway in record time.