Table 1 Bacterial pellets and spectroscopic characteristics of the 14 CPs in this study. The right seven columns give the CP sources and reported spectroscopic properties; only three of these genes had been codon optimized (Synthetic in fifth column). The left two columns show E. coli pellets expressing our BioBrick plasmid clones beside their ID numbers; only the amilGFP and amilCP plasmids were not codon optimized (see Fig. 1a and b)