Our Project

Infectious diseases including dengue fever, typhoid fever, and meningitis are symptomatically similar to malaria, and thus are often misdiagnosed in resource-poor developing countries lacking suitable medical diagnostic facilities. Failure to properly identify such diseases is concerning because it prevents medical professionals from administering appropriate treatments in a timely manner, resulting in economic costs and human suffering (Mabey, Peeling, Ustianowski, & Perkins, 2004). To address this issue, the iGEM Calgary 2014 team is developing a novel, genome-based, rapid point-of-care synthetic biological device to simultaneously diagnose multiple infectious diseases. We are engineering Bacillus subtilis to generate a chromophoric reporter protein in response to pathogenic genetic markers indicative of these diseases. These synthetic organisms will lie dormant as robust bacterial spores in a microfluidic device, enabling users to input blood samples and differentiate diseases based on colour of the output reporter proteins. Additionally, our system is a platform technology which can be adapted to detect a myriad of infectious agents by modifying the disease markers to which the system is targeted.