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 at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering describe unique 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. The discussion and findings are reported in Trends in Biotechnology and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Source: phys.org