The 2016 iGEM Toronto team has developed a synthetic biological sensor for detecting gold. It will take advantage of the natural transcriptional pathway which is induced by the gold-binding promoter, GolS. A reporter gene attached the promoter produces a colour change which will indicate the presence of gold. Furthermore, the entire construct has been removed from the rest of the cellular machinery, and is in fact paper based. This cell-free mechanism is cheaper and more convenient than traditional biosensing methods.

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