A three-colour biosensor reveals multimodal stress response at the single cell level and the spatiotemporal dynamics of biofilms.

We employed the orthogonally detectable red, green, and blue fluorescent proteins in a single vector system, dubbed RGB-S reporter, to enable simultaneous, independent and real-time analysis of the stress response in E. coli to physiological stress, genotoxicity, and cytotoxicity. We applied a “mini”- transcriptome  approach to sensor E. coli treated with 2-propanol 2 % by sorting approximately 1 million cells based on the single cell responses into four subpopulations, mono RFP, mono GFP, dual RFP-GFP, and triple RFP-GFP-BFP using FACS.