Sensbio: An online server for biosensor design

Allosteric transcription factor (aTF) based biosensors can be used to engineer genetic circuits for a wide range of applications. The literature and online databases contain hundreds of experimentally validated molecule-TF pairs, however the knowledge is scattered and often incomplete. Additionally, compared to the number of compounds that can potentially be produced using living systems, the number of those discovered with TF-based interactions is low. For these reasons, new tools that help researchers find new possible TF-ligand pairs are called for. In this work we present Sensbio (https://bit.ly/3OF4msH), an online web server that through similarity comparison against a TF-ligand reference database, is able to identify putative transcription factors that may be activated by a given input molecule. As a complement to the application, a predictive model has been developed to find new possible matches based on machine learning.