Modeling on the suicide mechanism of the reporter system

To eliminate potential safety problem, we constructed a suicide system on engineered bacteria to ensure biosafety. As the only one loaded with kill switch, the engineered reporter bacteria is responsible for eliminating all siblings in T-vaccine. Killing is mediated by the exported toxic protein SdpC. Extracellular SdpC induces the synthesis of an immunity protein, SdpI, which protects toxin-producing cells from being killed. SdpI, a polytopic membrane protein, is encoded by a two-gene operon under sporulation control that contains the gene for an autorepressor, SdpR.

The best growing condition for Bacillus subtilis WB800N

Designs of Immune Experiments

Our mice experiment has primarily proven the validity of our project. However, just like most scientific immune experiments on animals, the aim of our mice experiment was verification instead of exploring the optimal conditions for the production of our vaccine. In fact, fewer optimization experiments have been done by pure scientific researches, as most scientists care about facts and theories only, whereas exploring the optimal conditions is often viewed as the task of pharmaceutical factories. Yet since igem itself frequently involves industrial fields, which make igem seems like more an engineering competition than a science competition sometimes.