Development of a Bacterial Biosensor for Rapid Screening of Yeast p-Coumaric Acid Production

Transcription factor-based biosensors are used to identify producer strains, a critical bottleneck in cell factory engineering. Here, we address two challenges with this methodology: transplantation of heterologous transcriptional regulators into new hosts to generate functional biosensors and biosensing of the extracellular product concentration that accurately reflects the effective cell factory production; capacity. We describe the effects of different translation initiation rates on the dynamic range of a p-coumaric acid biosensor based on the Bacillus subtilis transcriptional repressor PadR by varying its ribosomal binding site. Furthermore, we demonstrate the functionality of this p-coumaric acid biosensor in Escherichia coli and Corynebacterium glutamicum. Finally, we encapsulate yeast p-coumaric acid-producing cells with E coli-biosensing cells in picoliter droplets and, in a microfluidic device, rapidly sort droplets containing yeast cells producing high amounts of extracellular p-coumaric acid using the fluorescent E colt biosensorlsignal. As,additional biosensors become available, such approaches will find broad applications for screening of an extracellular product.