The time-consuming and laborious characterization of protein or microbial strain designs limits the development of high-performance biocatalysts for biotechnological applications. Here, transcriptional biosensors emerged as valuable tools as they allow for rapid characterization of several thousand variants within a very short time. However, for many molecules of interest, no specific transcriptional regulator determining a biosensor's specificity is available. We present an approach for rapidly engineering biosensor specificities using a semirational transition ligand approach combined with fluorescence-activated cell sorting. In this two-step approach, a biosensor is first evolved toward a more relaxed-ligand specificity before using the resulting variant as the starting point in a second round of directed evolution toward high specificity for several chemically different ligands. By following this strategy, highly specific biosensors for 4-hydroxybenzoic acid, p-coumaric acid, 5-bromoferulic acid, and 6-methyl salicylic acid were developed, starting from a biosensor for the intracellular detection of trans-cinnamic acid.
Keywords: biosensors; directed evolution; fluorescence-activated cell sorting; molecular dynamics simulations; protein engineering.