Construction and Application of Riboswitch-Based Sensors That Detect Metabolites Within Bacterial Cells

A riboswitch is an RNA element that detects the level of a specific metabolite within the cell and regulates the expression of co-transcribed genes. By fusing a riboswitch to a reporter protein in a carefully designed and tested construct, this ability can be exploited to create an intracellular sensor that detects the level of a particular small molecule within live bacterial cells. There is a great deal of flexibility in the design of such a …