ACS Synthetic Biology published the most recent work by Sandoval and his coauthors Julia Rohlhill and Terry Papoutsakis at the University of Delaware. The article, entitled "Sort-Seq Approach to Engineering a Formaldehyde-Inducible Promoter for Dynamically Regulated Escherichia coli Growth on Methanol", reports on a high throughput method for engineering a transcription factor-promoter system using FACS and deep sequencing. The engineered promoters were used to 'refactor' a heterologous pathway for synthetic methylotrophy in E. coli, which resulted in increased biomass when grown in the presence of methanol.
The study made use of an information theory statistic, mutual information, to construct single-nucleotide resolution 'information maps' which displayed the importance of each base of the promoter and transcription factor binding site for gene expression. Mutual information also has applications in search engine technology and machine learning.
To read more, you can find the article at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acssynbio.7b00114!
