Sensitive and Specific Cadmium Biosensor Developed by Reconfiguring Metal Transport and Leveraging Natural Gene Repositories.

Whole-cell biosensors are useful for monitoring heavy metal toxicity in public health and ecosystems, but their development has been hindered by intrinsic trade-offs between sensitivity and specificity. Here, we demonstrated an effective engineering solution by building a sensitive, specific, and high-response biosensor for carcinogenic cadmium ions. We genetically programmed the metal transport system of to enrich intracellular cadmium ions and deprive interfering metal species.