Team:TU-Delft/Project

Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus is a bacterium responsible for several difficult-to-treat infections in humans. MRSA can be any strain of Staphylococcus aureus that has developed, through the process of natural selection, resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics. MRSA is especially troublesome in hospitals, prisons and nursing homes, where patients with open wounds, invasive devices, and weakened immune systems are at greater risk of infection than the general public. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that about 1.7 million infections occurred in the United States in 2002. More than 30% MRSA cases of total number of Staphyllococcus infections are in Europe.

Several newly discovered strains of MRSA show antibiotic resistance even to vancomycin and teicoplanin. These new evolutions of the MRSA bacterium are called Vancomycin intermediate-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VISA). There have been claims that bacteriophage can be used to cure MRSA.

For that reason we decided to use a different approach to deal with this MRSA problem.More specifically, the project would focus on killing the Staphylococcus species by antimicrobial peptides synthesized in an E.coli model organism.

However, we will not only focus on a new type of antibiotic molecule (the peptides) but also on a smart way to deliver them. In particular, our project consists of three main phases:

Sense - Produce - Kill

At the beginning, E.Coli detects S. Aureus through a quorum sensing mechanism. Afterwards a timer is activated and the peptide is produced . The existence of the timer is related to efficient delivery of high peptide concentration. By the end of the production, the produced peptide kills S.Aureus. The final step is the activation of a kill switch in order E.Coli to be killed. In that way, we ensure the safety of our system.

The Novel idea of this project is Antimicrobial peptides (also called host defense peptides) which are an evolutionarily conserved component of the innate immune response and are found among all classes of life. They have been demonstrated to kill Gram negative and Gram positive bacteria