Team:Austin UTexas/Description

Description

The indigenous gut microbiota in humans possesses the ability to synthesize neurotransmitters that are hypothesized to modulate behavioral, cognitive, and emotional processes of the body via the gut-brain axis. There is limited experimental evidence regarding the effectiveness of these “psychobiotics” in the gut as this is a relatively novel concept.

Thus, our project is aimed aimed at engineering an effective probiotic, or psychobiotic, capable of producing higher levels of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) to treat patients with anxiety and irritable bowel syndrome. The effectiveness of this probiotic in the human gut will be tested and refined using the gut of Apis mellifera, honey bee, as a model. Like humans, bees have a dynamic gut microbiome that influences host physiology. GABA is the neurotransmitter of interest due to its proposed anxiolytic and digestive regulating effects. Furthermore, the behavioral effects of GABA have been well-documented in bees. We can therefore expect to observe certain behaviors from bees after they ingest the GABA-producing psychobiotic, ultimately allowing us to gauge the efficacy of our designed probiotic.

In order to create an accurate and translational model, we will utilize Lactobacillus plantarum as our probiotic, as it is native to the guts of both humans and bees. Although L. plantarum can naturally synthesize GABA, we intend to expand the GABA-producing potential of the bacteria by characterizing and subsequently optimizing the expression of glutamate decarboxylase, an enzyme responsible for converting glutamate into GABA. Dosage of GABA will be limited through the incorporation of the Agr quorum sensing system from Staphylococcus aureus. The success of this project will invariably allow for other synthetic biologists to use the bee gut as a testable paradigm and characterize L. Plantarum, a non-model, lactic acid bacteria commonly found in probiotic foods such as chocolate, yogurt and kimchi.

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