Difference between revisions of "Team:USP-Brazil"
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| − | <p> | + | <p>Brazil is a tropical country with a huge amount of vector-borne diseases, which are a serious public health issue. For a long time we’ve been fighting against these diseases using several strategies, but we are always in favor of improvement. BioTROJAN aims to provide a new tool and new point of view to this problem, as we aimed to address that through the melding of two at first separated approaches: Synthetic Biology and Paratransgenesis!</p> |
<p>Paratransgenesis is a genetic engineering approach that is based on modifying a symbiont of an organism, to make an indirect change on its host. Work was done targeting vector-borne diseases, namely Chagas’ disease, Malaria, Dengue and Pierce’s disease. Using bacteria native to a host’s digestive system, it has been tried to make this bacteria liberate anti-parasite (effector) proteins, like if the bacteria were a Trojan horse being delivered inside mosquitoes through food. However, they were only constitutively expressed as a proof of concept, without regulation or concern with the design’s safety.</p> | <p>Paratransgenesis is a genetic engineering approach that is based on modifying a symbiont of an organism, to make an indirect change on its host. Work was done targeting vector-borne diseases, namely Chagas’ disease, Malaria, Dengue and Pierce’s disease. Using bacteria native to a host’s digestive system, it has been tried to make this bacteria liberate anti-parasite (effector) proteins, like if the bacteria were a Trojan horse being delivered inside mosquitoes through food. However, they were only constitutively expressed as a proof of concept, without regulation or concern with the design’s safety.</p> | ||
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Revision as of 20:32, 29 October 2017
SPONSORS
Integrating Paratransgenesis
and SynBio to erradicate
vector-borne diseases
We are the team from USP, the University São Paulo – capital and Ribeirão Preto’s campus – and this year we decided to work on a problem with great local importance, but also global reach:
Brazil is a tropical country with a huge amount of vector-borne diseases, which are a serious public health issue. For a long time we’ve been fighting against these diseases using several strategies, but we are always in favor of improvement. BioTROJAN aims to provide a new tool and new point of view to this problem, as we aimed to address that through the melding of two at first separated approaches: Synthetic Biology and Paratransgenesis!
Paratransgenesis is a genetic engineering approach that is based on modifying a symbiont of an organism, to make an indirect change on its host. Work was done targeting vector-borne diseases, namely Chagas’ disease, Malaria, Dengue and Pierce’s disease. Using bacteria native to a host’s digestive system, it has been tried to make this bacteria liberate anti-parasite (effector) proteins, like if the bacteria were a Trojan horse being delivered inside mosquitoes through food. However, they were only constitutively expressed as a proof of concept, without regulation or concern with the design’s safety.
We believe that through the union of the approaches of paratransgenesis and synthetic biology, we can make a system that is more robust and safe for field application, through the implementation of regulated promoters and a kill switch circuit along with the effector protein.
Feel free to read through the more theoretical part of our work in the Conceptual Framework pages, the part regarding our active work in the lab in our results pages and our community outreach in the Human Practices section. Meta-stuff (team talking about itself and attributions, and also iGEM specific stuff like parts and the interlab project) is located in our Team and Resources sections.
