Advances and prospects of transcription-factor-based biosensors in high-throughput screening for cell factories construction

Non/semi-rational engineering strategies can improve the performance of microbial cell factories under the situations of indistinct metabolic regulations and interactions. However, generating positive variants through these strategies is remarkably low. Using traditional screening methods to evaluate the performance of mutants, such as mass spectrometry and chromatography, is low-throughput, slow-detection, and labor-intensive. Specifically, the efficiency of high-throughput screening (HTS) for strain screening could reach even more 10³−10⁶ strains/day, bridging the gap between non/semi-rational engineering strategies and microbial cell factories construction. This review highlights transcription factor (TFs)-based biosensors in the advances in developing synthetic biosensors for HTS. We hope that this review will help take full advantage of valuable TFs to guide the HTS technology and promote its development.