ArticleNature communications2024
An autonomous microbial sensor enables long-term detection of TNT explosive in natural soil.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Engineering rhizobacterial communities for soil and plant health.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2026Review
- Synthetic Microbial Community Biosensors: From Engineered Ecosystems to Modular Detection Platforms with AI-Driven Intelligence.Biosensors · 2026Review
- Using Domain Insertion to Create Sulfite Reductases That Present Chemical-Dependent Activities.ACS synthetic biology · 2026Article
- Programming Next-Generation Synthetic Biosensors by Genetic Circuit Design.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Review
- Environmental monitoring from the air with hyperspectral reporters.Nature biotechnology · 2026Article
- Synthetic Biology of Plants and Microbes for Agriculture, Environment, and Future Applications.Chemical reviews · 2026Review
- Synthetic soils for ecological and synthetic biology applications.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Clays as Dual-Function Materials for TNT Adsorption and Catalytic Degradation: An Experimental Approach.Materials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Microbes can be engineered to sense target chemicals for environmental and geospatial detection. However, when engineered microbes operate in real-world environments, it remains unclear how competition with natural microbes affect their performance over long time periods. Here, we engineer sensors and memory-storing genetic circuits inside the soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis to sense the TNT explosive and maintain a long-term response, using predictive models to design riboswitch sensors, tune transcription rates, and improve the genetic circuit's dynamic range. We characterize the autonomous microbial sensor's ability to detect TNT in a natural soil system, measuring single-cell and population-level behavior over a 28-day period. The autonomous microbial sensor activates its response by 14-fold when exposed to low TNT concentrations and maintains stable activation for over 21 days, exhibiting exponential decay dynamics at the population-level with a half-life of about 5 days. Overall, we show that autonomous microbial sensors can carry out long-term detection of an important chemical in natural soil with competitive growth dynamics serving as additional biocontainment.
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Registered trials
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