Team:Tec-Chihuahua/Engagement

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Public Engagement

Tec-Chihuahua strongly believe that what´s most important about a project rather than the lab results, it is how transcendent it can be at the local, national and international aspect. None of the work is fully complete until results are shared and explained. Nevertheless, in Mexico, for people to understand the impact and benefit of our project, the society must first be aware of what biotechnology and synthetic biology are. Therefore, our public engagement consists in giving outreach about these subjects at everyone's understanding; looking to boost or initiate discussions within the public in general. To achieve these Tec-Chihuahua worked intensely on two projects.

TecChMun

TecChMun is a national event organized by a student group of the same name and takes place inside the facilities of the Tecnológico de Monterrey at Chihuahua, Mexico. This edition, the event is celebrating its 20th anniversary and, with the intention to have a more realistic approach, it has combined forces with iGEM´s Tec-Chihuahua to seek realistic, innovative perspectives for problem-solving.

The EamI is a regulated gene and more precisely and auto activator one. Its activator is formed by a dimer of a complex made by a LuxR protein bonded to an AHL molecule, thus two molecules of each are needed. The EamI protein itself is an AHL synthase, that is why it is called an auto activator, but how is it involved in QS virulence regulation? In Vibrio fischeri, when the activation of the LuxI gene is held, it also triggers the expression of the entire lux operon, where the genes responsible for producing the characteristic luminescence of this bacteria are found. Homologously speaking, this occurs the same way in E. amylovora, when the EamI activation is held, the genes that will be triggered are the virulence responsible ones: the exopolysaccharides (ams and lsc operons) and the T3SS. When this regulation is interrupted (our purpose), two virulence factors will be inhibited at once and maybe even three because of the correlation between the exopolysaccharides and biofilm formation. Given the great impact that inhibiting the QS has, we chose to focus on modeling the behavior of this phenomenon in our project. The model, for simplicity, only models the EamI expression but it assumes the trigger situation described before. The next image tries to demonstrate the autoregulation of the EamI gene a little bit more.