Using synthetic biology to develop customized living sensors for the continuous monitoring of water, Quantitative Biosciences Inc's platform provides real-time, quantitative information about water quality for long time periods with minimal oversight. The firm's current sensing capabilities include biosensor strains specific to arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, nitrate, nitrite, ammonium, phosphorus, and other common contaminants. Using its synthetic biology expertise, the firm can engineer new strains for almost any application from environmental contamination to process optimization. Benefits of the approach: sensors provide continuous, quantitative data regarding the contents of an input of interest. A single microfluidic cartridge can house hundreds of sensor strains, enabling a user to replace a suite of kits and probes with a single, low maintenance device. However, the greatest benefit of the platform is the expandability: it uses innovative approaches, grounded in an understanding of biological networks, to engineering new sensor strains. Once they have been constructed these strains can be integrated into the platform for no additional cost.
