Portable cellular load and stress detectors

Hosting synthetic genetic circuits imposes a load on a chassis. This load is manifest in the form of a number of stress responses and can result in detrimental effects on the growth of the host, and the function of the introduced system. This is particularly the case for production of heterologous proteins and metabolites which utilise a large amount of the cells available resources. For industrially applied bacterial chassis, it is desirable to be able to monitor the stress and load state of the cell. This will allow the circuit designer to incorporate features into their design to respond to these stresses if desired. In this talk I will give an update of the systems and computational methods we are using to deal with the problems of load and stress in Bacillus subtilis.