Construction of a whole cell biosensing platform for cancer, based on noninvasive metabolite biomarkers

Abstract

Whole Cell biosensors offer attractive properties for developing diagnostic tools with good reliability and cheap operation. With advances in genetic engineering, it is possible to construct genetic networks in organisms that respond to the presence of analytes in the organism’s growth environment. The application of such biosensors in cancer screening is promising with the investigation in metabolomics. Metabolite biomarkers have proven to be reliably correlated with cancer prognosis. In this project, we laid the foundation for constructing an array of biosensors for noninvasive detection of metabolite biomarkers in different cancer. We used the tauA gene promoter region to construct the taurine biosensor, which should produce Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) in the presence of taurine. Our objective is to detect and quantitatively estimate elevated taurine levels present in blood serum of breast cancer patients as reported in the literature. Assay of the biosensors and construction of other metabolite biosensing clones were not performed due to time constraints.