A microbial biosensor is an analytical device that couples microorganisms with a transducer to enable rapid, accurate and sensitive detection of target analytes in fields as diverse as medicine, environmental monitoring, defense, food processing and safety.

The earlier microbial biosensors used the respiratory and metabolic functions of the microorganisms to detect a substance that is either a substrate or an inhibitor of these processes. Recently, genetically engineered microorganisms based on fusing of gene reporters to an inducible gene promoter have been widely applied to assay toxicity and bioavailability.

This paper reviews the recent trends in the development and application of microbial biosensors. Current advances and prospective future direction in developing microbial biosensor have also been discussed. Submit here.

The word “biosensor” was used for the first time in 1966, according to our traditional reference databases. The word means that a biological element (nucleic acid, proteins, whole cells, …) will serve to sense an event or the presence of a substance that interacts with it. However, the “zero age” started long before 1966, with the first publication on a sensor in 1903, the concept of which was interestingly used by biologists to propose a new approach to measurements, traditionally the realm of chemists and physicists. https://bit.ly/2xc6mq8

This revolutionary concept allowed an incomparable increase in detection possibilities, since the diversity of proteins or antibodies is vast or can be designed to sense any kind of target.