Bioreporter information

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Bioreporter" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. (April 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Bioreporters are intact, living microbial cells that have been genetically engineered to produce a measurable signal in response to a specific chemical or physical agent in their environment. Bioreporters contain two essential genetic elements, a promoter gene and a reporter gene. The promoter gene is turned on (transcribed) when the target agent is present in the cell’s environment. The promoter gene in a normal bacterial cell is linked to other genes that are then likewise transcribed and then translated into proteins that help the cell in either combating or adapting to the agent to which it has been exposed. In the case of a bioreporter, these genes, or portions thereof, have been removed and replaced with a reporter gene. As a result, turning on the promoter gene also turns on the reporter gene, leading to the production of reporter proteins that output a detectable signal. The presence of a signal indicates that the bioreporter has sensed a particular agent in its environment.

Originally developed for fundamental analysis of factors affecting gene expression, bioreporters were early on applied for the detection of environmental contaminants^[1] and have since evolved into fields as diverse as medical diagnostics, precision agriculture, food safety assurance, process monitoring and control, and bio-microelectronic computing. Their versatility stems from the fact that there exist a large number of reporter gene systems that are capable of generating a variety of signals. Additionally, reporter genes can be genetically inserted into bacterial, yeast, plant, and mammalian cells, thereby providing considerable functionality over a wide range of host vectors.