Team:XJTLU-CHINA/Applied Design
Application
Dairy product
Yogurt has been an everyday dairy product that has its widespread application to improve humans’s intestine health. Our blueprint is to combine the benefits of yogurts as a daily commodity and the effectiveness of our antimicrobial peptide to serve as an intestine disease reinforced therapy. The yogurt itself has very obvious advantages of providing a large quantity of probiotics that can inhibit the growth of bad bacteria in the guts while keeping the good bacteria on work. In addition, Lactococcus lactis will function as the ideal host of our antimicrobial peptides. Firstly, it is rather common in yogurt. In addition, the probiotics host can reproduce in a rapid pace to accumulate and manufacture as much antimicrobial peptides to be effective. The metabolism pathways for L. latis is also more more controllable and will not produce some toxin outside the probiotics to induce some side effect. Most importantly, L. latis will only release the antimicrobial peptide once it gets in touch with pathogens, which minimize the possibilities of antibiotics resistance.
Reduction on Antibiotic resistance
Antibiotics have been very popular for its treatment of many serious diseases, say, in our case, human intestinal disease. Antibiotics conduct its effect by several mechanisms. We can either kill pathogens by damaging its cell wall or cell membrane structure, inhibiting its normal protein and nucleic acid synthesis or interfering with its metabolic pathways. Unfortunately, some pathogens will conjure some slippery tricks to help themselves survive, proliferate and eventually become highly resistant to the antibiotics, such as producing some new mutations rapidly or getting some genetic-makeups from old bacteria who has been antibiotic-resistant. In order to handle the problem of antibiotics resistance, we got some inspiration from the cocktail therapy in HIV treatment, in which different drug classes target different parts of HIV virus to impede the HIV replication and cell infection. Similarly, our idea is to use a multiple of antimicrobial peptides to attack the pathogens simultaneously in different parts of the bacteria. Therefore, only when the bacteria produce several mutations in the different parts at the same time can it survive the antimicrobial attack. This kind of mutation is very difficult for the bacteria to happen because it requires a series of mutation to occur together. If there is only one kind of mutation that can tackle with a certain kind of antimicrobial peptide, the bacteria will still be killed by other classes of antimicrobial peptides. And that's how our project works. Our L. latis will produce many kinds of different-functioned antimicrobial peptides together to realize a "cocktail" effect. In other words, there will be a higher genetic barrier to for bacteria to gain resistance. Another advantage of our project is that antimicrobial peptides will only be released as soon as the L. latis detect those pathogens, which can wisely control the drug dosage under an appropriate quantity depending on the patients' own condition, and thus effectively alleviate the problem of antibiotic overuse that will cause resistance. Later on. Thus, our project is not only good at treating bacterial intestine disease, but are also a good application of antibiotic resistance. Finally, our therapy can also serve as a means of testing the drug resistance. By analyzing phenotype and genotype of bacteria, the optimum combination of drugs for treatment may be detected.
Collaborators and Supporters
