Fluorescent biosensors light up high-throughput metabolic engineering

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 new approaches to this process and demonstrate how genetically encoded fluorescent biosensors can enable the generation and tes