2013.igem.org/Team:UI-Indonesia/Project

Project Description                       

Experimental

          Tuberculosis (TB) is a worldwide major health problem. One third of the world’s population are estimated to be infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It is the second major killer of adults after cardiovascular disease which kills 69.541 people and infect another 2.873.000 people anually. The absence of reliable diagnostic tool in suburban area, where TB cases are most likely found, is still a great obstacle in TB eradication effort.

          Indonesia is one of the high burden countries for TB. The currently used method for detecting TB, the acid fast bacilli smear, has several difficulties such as getting the sputum (instead of saliva), and training the laboratory personnel to do the test. Based on this problem, UI iGEM team are trying to create a reliable, portable, and easy to use diagnostic tool for detecting TB. We are constructing a biosensor consist of highly specific antibody bound to a reporter to detect the presence of protein Ag85, a novel TB biomarker.

          Here in this project, we are going to create a biosensor that will detect the presence of antigen 85, a potential tuberculosis biomarker. Antigen 85 is found in sputum, urine and most abundantly, blood serum of TB patient. Hence, blood serum of TB suspect will be used for the test. This biosensor designed to be able to detect TB more specfically than the existed method. The biosensor itself utilize split betagalactosidase combined with scFv (single chain fragment variable).

          To complete the biosensor we created, characterization method to analyze the presence of Antigen 85 qualitatively and quantitatively already constructed. Characterization method is easy enough so this biosensor could be used as a good kit for TB detection in suburban area. Qualitatively the

Human Practice

          Our human practice mainly focused on the misson to socialize synthetic biology from some different perspective. We decided High School Students to be our main target since they are the young generation who will rule the future. Synthetic biology depends on the people who used it. Hence, describing some different perspective about it will give a big impact to their diecision in defining synthetic biology.

          Students targeted are students in High School around Jakarta. Their knowledge are about higher than other area, and synthetic biology facilities in those area are provided fairly. Hence, they have a big probability to deal with synthetic biology in the future. We have designed our human practice so that the students will get information directly in balance. We decided to use a simple learning kit we made by ourselves, to explain our project and also synthetic biology. The kit produced created simply so High School teacher will be able to use it in the class, for the next students in the next years.

          In human practice, we also gather opinions and suggestions from the expert in synthetic biology to be discussed and illustrate synthetic biology in a whole. We will also use those opinions to fill the gap between student’s knowledge and complexity of our project. We also use artificial options to present  the big impact of our project specifically, and synthetc biology generally. Not in order to make a good opinion about it, but to build a fair perspective about it.