Microbes have become an increasingly powerful chassis for developing diagnostic and therapeutic technologies. While many of the earlier engineering efforts used microbes that expressed relevant proteins constitutively, more microbes are being engineered to express them with region-selectivity and disease-responsiveness through biosensors. Such ‘smart’ microbes have been developed to diagnose and treat a wide range of disorders and diseases, including bacterial infections, cancers, inflammatory disorders, and metabolic disorders. In this review, we discuss synthetic biology technologies that have been applied to engineer microbes for biomedical applications, focusing on recent reports that demonstrate microbial sensing by using animal models or clinical samples. Advances in synthetic biology will enable engineered microbes to significantly improve the medical field.

微生物已成为开发诊断和治疗技术的越来越强大的底盘。虽然许多早期的工程努力使用组成型表达相关蛋白质的微生物，但更多的微生物正在被设计为通过生物传感器以区域选择性和疾病响应性表达它们。这种“智能”微生物已被开发用于诊断和治疗范围广泛的失调和疾病，包括细菌感染、癌症、炎症失调和代谢失调。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了已应用于生物医学应用工程微生物的合成生物学技术，重点关注最近使用动物模型或临床样本证明微生物传感的报告。