Projects per year
Abstract / Description of output
Cell-based biosensors have great potential to detect various toxic and pathogenic contaminants in aqueous environments. However, frequently they cannot meet practical requirements due to insufficient sensing performance. To address this issue, we investigated a modular, cascaded signal amplifying methodology. We first tuned intracellular sensory receptor densities to increase sensitivity, and then engineered multi-layered transcriptional amplifiers to sequentially boost output expression level. We demonstrated these strategies by engineering ultrasensitive bacterial sensors for arsenic and mercury, and improved detection limit and output up to 5,000-fold and 750-fold respectively. Coupled by leakage regulation approaches, we developed an encapsulated microbial sensor cell array for low-cost, portable and precise field monitoring, where the analyte can be readily quantified via displaying an easy-to-interpret volume bar-like pattern. The ultrasensitive signal amplifying methodology along with the background regulation and the sensing platform will be widely applicable to many other cell-based sensors, paving the way for their real-world applications.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 540–548 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Nature Chemical Biology |
Volume | 15 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 25 Mar 2019 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- cell-based sensor
- signal amplification
- sensor cell array
- synthetic biology
- arsenic
- toxic metals
- mercury
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Cascaded amplifying circuits enable ultrasensitive cellular sensors for toxic metals'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 3 Finished
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Low cost paper-based biosensors for point-of-care nucleic acid diagnostics of pathogens
Wang, B.
31/10/16 → 30/04/18
Project: Research
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Programmable single-cell biocomputers with scalable signal processing capacity
Wang, B.
8/08/16 → 31/12/19
Project: Research
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Enabling synthetic biology with an expanded library of engineered orthogonal genetic logic gates and switches
Wang, B.
1/07/16 → 30/06/19
Project: Research
Profiles
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Chris French
- School of Biological Sciences - Personal Chair of Microbial Biotechnology
- Centre for Engineering Biology
Person: Academic: Research Active