Florida_Atlantic
Project Description
OwlGems team is currently comprised of high-school, undergraduate, graduate, and mentoring professionals who's aim is to help create microbial innovations for global improvement. Our team has chosen to tackle the problem of counterfeit medications in the developing world. These fake drugs not only prevent the sick from receiving treatment, but can also lead to the evolution of drug-resistant pathogens. Detection methods do exist currently, but they are expensive, time consuming, and lack either sensitivity or specificity. In order to overcome these current detection shortfalls, we are developing a system to rapidly create drug biosensors that are inexpensive, specific, and sensitive to the presence of their target drug. Our current focus is directed at using bioinformatics techniques to select a viable protein to be integrated to a host replication cell that will bind to artemisinin to produce a color indicator to test the strength of the possible counterfeit.