In a few minutes, 17 water pollutants were taste buds from the bacteria.

A few minutes to "taste" 17 kinds of water pollutants This detection platform "taste buds" actually come from bacteria
test water quality can also be as fast, convenient and accurate as pregnancy testing? A new technology led by researchers at Northwestern University in the United States, published in Nature Biotechnology, is a handheld platform that can detect 17 different pollutants in water quality, including toxic metals, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and clean detergents, in just a few minutes. When a pollutant is detected to exceed the standards published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it emits a green light.
, a professor at Tianjin University's School of Chemical Engineering, said that this seemingly convenient and simple new technology can not be separated from the great improvement of human capacity to transform nature. Relying on cellless synthetic biology, this new technology is engineered to manipulate more than a hundred biological molecules and allow them to work together to ultimately achieve the goal of sewage monitoring.
broken cell membranes, it is easier to design cells
."This 'test paper' for detecting contaminants is interesting and seems to be the same as the use of 'pregnancy test sticks', but it is completely beyond the bio-chemical system of traditional test paper, and the preparation method is much more complex than the traditional test paper." Qi Hao explained that the team used molecular machines from bacterial cells that used bacteria to taste the "taste buds" of small molecules in the water and then designed and recombined them. These reprogrammed "taste buds" become storage-resistant after freezing and drying and can be made into "test paper" for easy use.
" technology is mainly the use of cellless synthesis biology. Synthetic biology technology is mainly based on cells for chassis engineering design. But engineering cells is time-time-timed and difficult. Qi Hao introduced, because of the complexity of living cell life system, genetic components difficult to standardize, cell membrane obstruction, cell growth and adaptability processes are usually inconsistent with engineering objectives, producing a large number of invalid products, greatly limiting the transformation of biological components.
"If we want to use artificial design to achieve more artificial purposes, we must break the shackles of cells." Cell-free synthesis biology uses cellular resources to break cell membranes, remove molecular components, including DNA, RNA, and proteins, from cells, and reprogram them to perform new tasks. That is, in the in-body open system, gene transcription, protein translation and metabolic processes are realized. Qi Hao explained that cells are like a computer, the computer's motherboard, sound card, graphics card and other components have their own use. After we understand the use of each component, the computer is disassembled, the originals are broken down, according to our own purposes to use the functions of each component, processing and transformation to produce more products.
"Cellless synthesis biology is a more microscopic technique that enters the inside of cells and is engineered at the molecular level to achieve the goals we set." Qi Hao introduced that this transformation project is a huge system, such as this pollutant monitoring technology, is through high sensitivity RNA polymerase, variable protein transcription factors and synthetic DNA transcription template combination, can adjust the synthesis of fluorescence-activated RNA fittings, so that the presence of pollutants induced the transcription of this fitting, resulting in fluorescent signal generation.
is developing rapidly and the research field is very
."When people are able to use the various molecular machines in their cells at their own pace, it's a big step forward than using the whole cell's technology." Qi Hao introduced, in fact, as early as the 1950s, researchers have found the core mechanism of cell synthesis protein, and found that after breaking the cell membrane, the resulting cytoste also has the ability to protein synthesis. Since then, researchers have begun to study protein synthesis, establishing the preparation method, the basic steps of the experiment.
the conversion potential of cellless gene expression is limited by a variety of factors, including low and variable protein synthesis yield, short reaction duration and small response scale. Over the past 20 years, however, synthetic biology researchers have gradually freed themselves from the potential for cellless gene expression, and laboratory research has led to new breakthroughs that have led to greater efficiency and application. In addition to the use of microorganisms, also began to use plant, mammalian cells as cultured cells, but also developed a number of systems of the nucleocytes. At the same time, protein synthesis is increasing with the development of preparation process.
"Cellless synthetic organisms have a wide range of research areas, and cellless protein expression systems are one of their main research directions." Qi Hao introduced, this pollutant monitoring on the use of this system, from E. coli to remove small molecule levels of the "taste bud" part, designed for a certain protein expression system. Green fluorescence, which also appears, is achieved by expressing a fluorescent protein.
" can also use thousands of different sequences of DNA to form a variety of nanostructures, which also belong to the field of cellless synthesis biotechnology; in metabolic engineering, through cell-free synthesis biotechnology, a variety of metabolic enzymes can be purified, put in a system, through different bio-chemical reaction environments, so that these proteins work together to complete a complex chemical metabolic process." Introduction by Qi Hao.
addition, cellless synthesis biotechnology has an important area of research, which is to go beyond nature and create something that nature does not have." 'We know that proteins are synthesized from 20 natural amino acids, and cell-free synthesis biotechnology can synthesize new amino acids, ' Mr. Qi explained. For example, the technology of gene origami, through the artificial design of molecular sequences on DNA, the DNA into letters, two-dimensional, three-dimensional and other arbitrary structures. This origami technology is not possible in cells, and the application of cell-free synthesis biotechnology can create substances that nature has never had before.
is promising, but it's still a long way from
."Although cellless synthetic biotechnology has grown rapidly in recent years and has broad application prospects, it was more of a means and a tool for scientific research prior to this pollutant monitoring program released by Northwestern University." Qi Hao introduced that laboratories and pharmaceutical companies will use cell-free synthetic biotech protein expression tools, fast and simple. Because before this technique, it takes a long time to get a protein that needs to be separated and purified. The technology, which can be used to obtain proteins that researchers want to study in a very short period of time, is often used as a biopharmaceity screening technique.
" uses similar technology to enable high-sensitivity virus detection, which is more sensitive than nucleic acid detection, more accurate differentiation, and has been used as a testing agent to detect the Zika virus. In fact, protein drugs, vaccines, detection antibodies are protein-based drugs, can be used in cellless synthetic organisms protein expression system generation. Mr Qi said these were cutting-edge technologies, but were still in the process of transformation.
addition, cellless synthesis technology is easier to achieve in engineering design, and bio-chemical reagents can be produced by stripping and purifying living substances. Without cell binding, these reagents are easier to match with existing automation equipment and therefore easier to scale production in the laboratory. For example, it takes two or three days to synthesize proteins through biotechnology, and with cell-free technology, it can be done in an hour or two to better control protein production and standardize.
" use of cell-free synthesis biotechnology to synthesize amino acids, but also to better expand the function of proteins. For example, some enzymes, when we put synthetic amino acids at the core of the enzyme, the activity of the enzyme will increase hundreds of times and thousands of times. Qi Hao went on to say that US DNA origami technology can be used to make biometric robots that can control other molecules. For example, fold DNA into a box, put anti-cancer drugs in the box, when the box encounters cancer cells, will release anti-cancer drugs. All these expand the scope of human intervention in nature.
to better use the technology, humans need to better understand the properties of each molecule in a cell, " he said. Although cellless synthesis biotechnology is widely studied in the laboratory, it is still some way from being applied to people's lives. Qi Hao predicts that in the future, cellless synthetic biotechnology may be the first to be applied to pharmaceutical research and development, and that test products may be converted more quickly.
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