An autonomous microbial sensor enables long-term detection of TNT explosive in natural soil

Erin A. Essington, Grace E. Vezeau, Daniel P. Cetnar, Emily Grandinette, Terrence H. Bell and Howard M. Salis ()
Additional contact information
Erin A. Essington: The Pennsylvania State University
Grace E. Vezeau: The Pennsylvania State University
Daniel P. Cetnar: The Pennsylvania State University
Emily Grandinette: The Pennsylvania State University
Terrence H. Bell: University of Toronto
Howard M. Salis: The Pennsylvania State University

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Abstract Microbes can be engineered to sense target chemicals for environmental and geospatial detection. However, when engineered microbes operate in real-world environments, it remains unclear how competition with natural microbes affect their performance over long time periods. Here, we engineer sensors and memory-storing genetic circuits inside the soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis to sense the TNT explosive and maintain a long-term response, using predictive models to design riboswitch sensors, tune transcription rates, and improve the genetic circuit’s dynamic range. We characterize the autonomous microbial sensor’s ability to detect TNT in a natural soil system, measuring single-cell and population-level behavior over a 28-day period. The autonomous microbial sensor activates its response by 14-fold when exposed to low TNT concentrations and maintains stable activation for over 21 days, exhibiting exponential decay dynamics at the population-level with a half-life of about 5 days. Overall, we show that autonomous microbial sensors can carry out long-term detection of an important chemical in natural soil with competitive growth dynamics serving as additional biocontainment.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54866-y Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-54866-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-54866-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().