Initial Brainstorm Ideas

A biosensor for a world wide disease
Detecting PAMPs in bacterial by a novel cleavage mechanism in simulated serum samples

* Detecting pneumolysin for strep. pneumo by using specific antigens/receptors

IDEA #1

PAMPS are referred to as pathogen associated molecular patterns, they're basically parts of bacteria that are recognized by our immune system as foreign. I've followed up and researched a bit more about this idea and propose that we could possibly:

Introduce a number of genes into a particular cell line, since each of our cells have specific proteins called caspases that are cleaved upon detecting a bacterial product (e.g Flagellin from bacteria); these caspases normally cause a number of processes that leads to cell death but ONLY upon sensing bacterial products, they become active. However, if we could somehow get caspases to recognize a particular protein (e.g green florescent protein - GFP) into our introduced samples and cleave it so that GFP becomes active, then we've developed a cool biological sensor that can detect particular bacterial products. Of course, similarly we'd have to make sure that we prevent cell death from occurring (this could be through the introduction of inhibitors of effector caspases e.g Caspase 3 that are the actual executors of cell death.)

Below I've attached a review on caspases https://yuan.med.harvard.edu/sites/yuan.med.harvard.edu/files/documents/onc2008297a.pdf

An insightful page on GFP (note there's also other different colours e.g YFP, RFP that could also be introduced as well - so that if we introduce other different bacterial products, e.g instead of flagellin something else like LPS than it would florescence a different color)

http://www.conncoll.edu/ccacad/zimmer/GFP-ww/shimomura.html

I've also attached a paper that demonstrates the feasibility of this approach, in this paper they basically were able to engineer a GFP that can be cleaved by caspases and becomes active.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21558267 - probably just read the abstract, bottom lines.

I'm happy too explain to anyone about caspases and how this system works - perhaps when we come to initial ideas and anyone is interested, I can draw a diagram and then just explain it further - Waqar.