Highlights•Harnessing cellular processes to produce valuable metabolic products is of
growing economic importance.•However, biological complexity necessitates many attempts …

Human activities have resulted in the release and introduction into the environment of a
plethora of aromatic chemicals. The interest in discovering how bacteria are dealing with …

The expectations raised in the mid-1980s on the potential of genetic engineering for in situ
remediation of environmental pollution have not been entirely fulfilled. Yet, we have learned …

Abstract Within the Design-Build-Test Cycle for strain engineering, rapid product detection
and selection strategies remain challenging and limit overall throughput. Here we …

Monitoring cellular behavior and eventually properly adapting cellular processes is key to
handle the enormous complexity of today's metabolic engineering questions. Hence …

Ubiquitous noxious hydrophobic substances, such as hydrocarbons, pesticides and diverse
industrial chemicals, stress biological systems and thereby affect their ability to mediate …

Engineering bacteria for measuring chemicals of environmental or toxicological concern
(bioreporter bacteria) has grown slowly into a mature research area. Despite many potential …

Traditionally, pollution risk assessment is based on the measurement of a pollutant's total
concentration in a sample. The toxicity of a given pollutant in the environment, however, is …

For many regulators of bacterial biodegradation pathways, small molecule/effector binding is
the signal for triggering transcriptional activation. Thus, regulation results from a cross-talk …

Similar to the New World explorers of the 16th and 17th century, microbiologists today find
themselves at the edge of unknown territory. It is estimated that only 0.1–1% of …