Yeast as biosensor?

[Kwabena]

Hello! 

I have been doing some reading on biosensors and I discovered yeast can be used to detect the presence of heavy metals in water. I would like to know if they can be useful in medicine, say to detect antibodies or antigens? Thanks in advance for any information.

K.Boat

[Nathan McCorkle]

These code for mercury resistance, not sure if they have sensor
components you could copy and hook up to a reporter gene in addition
to the resistance gene:

Expression of bacterial mercuric ion reductase in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC206423/

there's also tn501 for e.coli and other bacteria

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[Mega [Andreas Stuermer]]

Yeast2hybrids?

Maybe this works for your idea to activate (glowing) when it detects (malaria) antibodies?? 

[Mega [Andreas Stuermer]]

I looked it up. 

If you know which is the epitope... No... 

You could do it the other way round, you need to produce an antibody coupled to an RNA polymerase binding factor. If your ... No... 

Then you would need a antigen bound to a DNA-binding protein... 

Can't say... Maybe here anybody can evaluate the usability of this? 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-hybrid_screening

Am Donnerstag, 13. März 2014 08:09:41 UTC+1 schrieb Kwabena:

[Koeng]

I'd say B sutbilis is a better choice for organism. It is easier to engineer because its a prokaryote, more naturally competent, spores well, and has already been in a number of iGem topics on this

[Kwabena]

Thanks for all the information. I'll look into them.

[Joseph Chemler]

You are looking essentially for an alternative to ELISA? I am not sure if the features provided by ELISA can matched using a much more complex system involving a eukaryote.

Yeast two hybridization assays have a high false positive rate. 

Something using yeast phage display of antibodies may work.

Still... there are already highly sensitive analytical methods available.

[Kwabena]

I was thinking the yeast could be used as a diagnostic tool on site. I think ELISA would be too laborious to be used on site.