Team:Paris Bettencourt/Project/Foot Odor

Aims and Achievement

Foot odor is generally perceived as socially awkward and negative. There are a many commercially available solutions for this problem.
However, all current products indiscriminately target all bacteria of the microbiome, which can have negative effects on skin health. In this project we aim to develop a targeted approach to prevent foot odor, without destroying the beneficial microbes.

Introduction

Foot odor (or bromhidrosis) is a unique type of body odor that is generally considered to be unpleasant.
The malodorous compounds are produced by bacteria metabolizing sweat, which is almost odorless, into volatile, unpleasant compounds.
Bacillus subtilis, a common bacterium that lives on the foot is thought to produce the malodorous molecules behind this socially awkward condition. One of those molecules made by B. subtilis uses the leucine degradation pathway to produce isovaleric acid, which smells like parmesan cheese, which is considered to be to dominant smell of bromhidrosis.

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Results

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Methods

We hypothesize that bad foot odor could be eradicated by perturbing the Leucine degradation pathway.
We choose leucine dehydrogenase and iso-valeryl coA to perturb the leucine degradation pathway. Our goal here is to have two different strategies to inhibit isovaleric acid production. our first strategy focus on producing B.subtilis which will not be capable of producing leucine, so that it has to utilize all the leucine it could get from the sweat for its own survival rather than the production of isovaleric acid. Our second strategy focus on developing B.subtilis strain, which will be capable of producing leucine but not isovaleric acid.