Team:TU-Delft/Safety

Safety

The MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus) problem is our inspiration for this project. This project will focus on killing the Staphylococcus species by antimicrobial peptides synthesized in E. coli.

As we work in the lab which has only BSL-1 permit we did intense literature study to find closely related organisms of same genera other than S. aureus (DSMZ 6148) that can be used for our project. We used S. delphini (DSMZ 20771) which had some close similarities with S. aureus (DSMZ 6148) to test our peptides and have a prediction of their possible effect on the MRSA . The antimicrobial peptides where chosen in such a way that they have high minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) for humans and low for S. aureus.

In order prevent release of live GMO's to the environment and for a safe administration of patients , we added a kill switch that is controlled by a timer. This will allow the self destruction of the cells after the desired peptides are produced. But, there are problems of release of lippopolysaccharides (LPS) after lysis, this can be overcome by using a gram positive bacterial chassis [1] which does not have a problem LPS.

Safety forms were approved on October 3, 2013 by Evan Appleton, iGEM Safety Committee.

References

1. Volzing, K., Borrero, J., Sadowsky, M. and Kaznessis, Y. 2013. Antimicrobial Peptides Targeting Gram-negative Pathogens, Produced and Delivered by Lactic Acid Bacteria. ACS synthetic biology.