Team:TU-Delft

We are the iGEM 2013 team of Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. We are working on the production of antimicrobial peptides in order to kill methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, MRSA.

To engineer E. coli that can detect MRSA in order to locally produce and deliver antimicrobial peptides.

The sensing part of the of Staphylococcus aureus Agr system is engineered in E. coli. In that way E. coli detects the AIPs that are produced by Staphylococcus aureus which induces the peptide production.

E. coli detects Staphylococcus aureus by its own quorum sensing system, and at that moment inactivated antimicrobial peptides are being produced

With the use of a timer the peptide will be activated by cleavage of an inactivating tag. With the use of a timer, high concentrations of peptide can be delivered very locally in order to efficiently kill MRSA.

In order to ensure the safety of the system, the peptide activating protease is combined with a kill switch that will kill our E. coli.

Zephyr is a low-cost Do It Yourself (DIY) machine which can scan petridishes and 96 well plates for expression of fluorescence at micrometer scale.