Applications of Whole-cell Bacterial Sensors in Biotechnology and Environmental Science.
From: Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Osaka University, 1-6 Yamada-oka, Suita, Osaka, 565-0871, Japan. yagi@phs.osaka-u.ac.jp
Applied microbiology and biotechnology
- Publish Date: Jan 2007
- ISSN: 0175-7598
- Volume: 73
- Issue: 6
- Pages: 1251-8
- Medium: Print
- Language: English
- Citation (JAMA): Yagi Kiyohito, et al. Applications of Whole-cell Bacterial Sensors in Biotechnology and Environmental Science.. Appl. Microbiol. Biotechnol. Jan 2007;73:1251-8
Abstract
Biosensors have major advantages over chemical or physical analyses with regard to specificity, sensitivity, and portability. Recently, many types of whole-cell bacterial biosensors have been developed using recombinant DNA technology. The bacteria are genetically engineered to respond to the presence of chemicals or physiological stresses by synthesizing a reporter protein, such as luciferase, beta-galactosidase, or green fluorescent protein. In addition to an overview of conventional biosensors, this minireview discusses a novel type of biosensor using a photosynthetic bacterium as the sensor strain and the crtA gene, which is responsible for carotenoid synthesis, as the reporter. Since bacteria possess a wide variety of stress-response mechanisms, including antioxidation, heat-shock responses, nutrient-starvation, and membrane-damage responses, DNA response elements for several stress-response proteins can be fused with various reporter genes to construct a versatile set of bacterial biosensors for a variety of analytes. Portable biosensors for on-site monitoring have been developed using a freeze-dried biosensing strain, and cell array biosensors have been designed for high-throughput analysis. Moreover, in the future, the use of single-cell biosensors will permit detailed analyses of samples. Signals from such sensors could be detected with digital imaging, epifluorescence microscopy, and/or flow cytometry.
Mesh Headings (Keywords): Bacteria, Biosensing Techniques, Biotechnology, Ecology, Genetic Engineering, Green Fluorescent Proteins, Luciferases, beta-Galactosidase
Check for Full Text / PubMed Unique Identifier (PMID): 17111136
This abstract is part of PubMed, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. PubMed includes more than 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles. See Copyright and Disclaimers.
Linked medical terms appearing on this page are added by Healia to help readers find more information and are not part of the original PubMed document.
The data herein was last updated on July 8th, 2008 and may not reflect the most current and accurate data available from NLM.