Bacterial synthetic biology articles from across Nature Portfolio

The authors develop a metabolic engineering strategy for improving polyketide production of industrial interest and discovering new natural products in bacteria.

Solar-driven biomanufacturing using semiconductor biohybrids has the potential to achieve sustainable chemical production, but it is challenging to scale up. Here, the authors present a strategy to achieve scalable solar-driven waste-to-chemical conversion using wastewater-derived biohybrids.

Bacteria-based living drugs can treat a broad range of diseases. This Review discusses challenges to the clinical translation of engineered bacterial therapeutics and how advances in synthetic biology and nanomedicine can help overcome them.

Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942 was modified to import and use monosaccharides, which allows it to grow on lignocellulosic lysate and produce 2,3-butanediol.

This study reports that an engineered bee symbiont provides protection against Nosema ceranae infection.

The collection of RNAs in a cell reflects its identity and behavior. Although probing these RNAs in the present is commonplace, peering into the past remains challenging. We developed TIGER (transcribed RNAs inferred by genetically encoded records) to record selected RNAs at the single-cell level, enabling us to connect the past with the present.

This study used engineered bacteria to record the transcriptional responses of transiting bacteria in the gut environment.

A recent study finds that sense codon reassignment enables phage resistance and encoded polymer synthesis in Escherichia coli.

Two studies report synthetic genetic circuits for inducible asymmetric cell division that give rise to cellular differentiation in Escherichia coli.

Only a tiny fraction of bacterial species can be cultured and engineered in the laboratory, limiting our ability to deploy bacteria in harsh environments or use them to produce important compounds. Recent work has opened this frontier by developing new methods to characterize and engineer diverse, undomesticated bacterial species.