Team:Hong Kong HKUST/Project

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Project Description

''Streptococcus pneumoniae'' infection is a leading cause of many pneumococcal diseases such as meningitis, septicaemia and otitis media. According to the World Health Organization, pneumococcal diseases are estimated to be responsible for 1.6M deaths every year. According to National Institutes of Health, 40% to 70% infected children are killed or disabled by this disease in developing countries. To provide an affordable solution to combat pneumococcal diseases, our team came up with Pneumosensor, an engineered ''E. coli" designated to work inside an ''in vitro'' diagnostic device that would detect ''S. pneumoniae''.

Pneumosensor achieves its function by making use of quorum sensing pathway components in ''S. pneumoniae''. ''S. pneumoniae'' secretes an autoinducer molecule known as Competence Stimulating Peptide (CSP), which activates the comCDE signal transduction pathway and increases the uptake of extracellular DNA during the log phase of bacterial growth. Our team is migrating and rewiring this quorum-sensing mechanism into ''E. coli'' to sense and report populations of ''S. pneumoniae''. Alongside this track, we are thoroughly cataloging and characterizing existing riboregulators submitted by previous teams. We believe that this will be useful for other synthetic biologists.

In summary, our team hopes to alleviate the health complications caused by ''S. pneumoniae'' by designing and constructing a whole-cell biosensor that can kill ''S. pneumoniae''. Moreover, we are curating existing RNA devices for the benefit of other future iGEM teams and those working in the synthetic biology field.


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