Designing and Assembling Plasmids for the Construction of Escherichia coli Biosensor for Vibrio cholerae Detection.

Abstract

In the process of constructing and characterizing the whole cell biosensor for Vibrio cholerae detection, two main techniques have been employed-DNA assembly using the Gibson isothermal assembly reaction was used for the assembly of the PCRed plasmid fragments (DNA parts), and microplate fluorescence readings were used for bacterial strain characterization. The general workflow can be summed up as: the in silico designed DNA fragments were assembled by isothermal assembly to be later transformed into Escherichia coli that, in turn, was characterized using the microplate reader. As fine-tuning of the sensor design was required, the process was repeated iteratively until the final strain was created with desired characteristics. This chapter describes in detail this workflow for different constructs which finally led to the creation of the first whole cell biosensor in E. coli for V. cholerae detection.