WELCOME TO iGEM 2014!

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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 detect 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.

Tell us more about your project. Give us background. Use this as the abstract of your project. Be descriptive but concise (1-2 paragraphs)

References

iGEM teams are encouraged to record references you use during the course of your research. They should be posted somewhere on your wiki so that judges and other visitors can see how you though about your project and what works inspired you.

You can use these subtopics to further explain your project

1. Overall project summary
2. Project Details
3. Materials and Methods
4. The Experiments
5. Results
6. Data analysis
7. Conclusions

It's important for teams to describe all the creativity that goes into an iGEM project, along with all the great ideas your team will come up with over the course of your work.

It's also important to clearly describe your achievements so that judges will know what you tried to do and where you succeeded. Please write your project page such that what you achieved is easy to distinguish from what you attempted.