Testing the specificity of an E. coli based V. cholerae biosensor

In this paper, we tested how specific the sensor is. So far CAI-1 and its variants has been shown to be produced only by V. cholerae strains and detected by CqsS. To investigate if this CqsS specificity towards CAI-1 is maintained in our sensor, we tested our E. coli biosensor with other commonly encountered quorum sensing molecules (e.g., AHL) and bacteria species known to be found in the human digestive tract and/or are known to communicate using quorum sensing mechanisms. This included Lactobacillus rhamnosus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, different Vibrio cholerae strains and Bacillus subtilis.