Team:Toulouse/Project/Overview

Canker is one of the most important infection caused by fungi and it particularly affects plane trees (Platanus sp.). Plane trees are widely present in Southern France and participate to the site gorgeousness. Today, the only treatment consists in preventive tree-cutting which has a huge cost and implies significant ecological troubles. Facing this emergency, our team offers an innovation alternative originated from synthetic biology.

Indeed, the aim of our project is to design an endophytic bacterium called SubtiTree which is able to detect and target the pathogen in order to deliver different fungicides to save the tree from its invaders. This project limits the spreading of our engineered bacterium in the environment by considering ecological and ethical matters.

First, the bacterium targets the fungi thanks to a chimiotactism module which recognizes the soluble chitin monomers (N-acetyl-glucosamine).

Then, SubtiTree binds onto the pathogen by a chimeric protein anchored on one side to the bacterium pepdidoglycan and on the other side to the fungal chitin-based wall.

To finish, our designed bacterium fights against the pathogen by setting up a powerful treatment based on the production of three different fungicides.

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