Team:XJTLU-CHINA/Applied Design
Applications
Dairy products
Yogurt has been an everyday dairy product which can improve human intestinal health. Our blueprint is to combine the benefits of yogurts as a daily commodity and the effectiveness of antimicrobial peptides to serve as an intestine disease targeted therapy. The yogurt itself has a very obvious advantages in providing a large quantity of probiotics which can inhibit the growth of bad bacteria in the guts while keeping the good bacteria on work. In addition, Lactococcus lactis will function as an ideal host of antimicrobial peptides. Firstly, it is rather common to be present in yogurt. In addition, the probiotics can reproduce in a rapid pace to accumulate and manufacture enough antimicrobial peptides to be effective. The metabolic pathways of L. lactis is also well-known and will not produce some toxins outside the probiotics to give undesirable side effects. Most importantly, L. lactis will only release the antimicrobial peptides once it gets in touch with a specific pathogen, which minimizes the possibilities of antibiotics resistance.
Reduction in antibiotic resistance
Antibiotics have been very popular for its treatment of many serious infections, say, in our case, human intestinal diseases. Antibiotics exert their effects via several mechanisms. They can either kill pathogens by damaging their cell wall or cell membrane structure, inhibiting normal protein and nucleic acid synthesis or interfering with their metabolic pathways. Unfortunately, some pathogens will conjure some slippery tricks to help themselves to survive, proliferate and eventually become highly resistant to the antibiotics, such as producing some new mutations rapidly or acquiring genetic-makeup from old bacteria which have antibiotic resistance. In order to handle the problem of acquiring antibiotics resistance, we got inspiration from the technique used in the cocktail treatment for HIV infection, in which different drugs targeting different parts of HIV are used in impeding the HIV replication and cell infection. Similarly, our idea hopes to use a multiple kinds 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 structures simultaneously can it survive the antimicrobial attack. Simultaneous mutation in different structures is very difficult and unlikely to happen. If there is only one mutation that leads to the resistance to an antimicrobial peptide, the bacteria will still be killed by other classes of antimicrobial peptides. And that's how our project works. Our L. lactis will produce many kinds of antimicrobial peptides working together to realize a "cocktail" effect. In other words, there will be a higher genetic barrier for the bacteria to gain resistance. Another advantage of our project is that antimicrobial peptides will only be released as soon as L. lactis detects Staphylococcus aureus, 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.
Collaborators and Supporters
