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General Design

Our design has two systems:
The Antimicrobial Peptide System, which produces the peptide LL-37; and
The Resistance and Expulsion System which produces the MarA protein, which activates the arcAB & TolC operons, activating the arcAB & TolC efflux pump.

Antimicrobial Peptide System

H. pylori and other pathogenic bacteria produce AI-2, a quorum sensing molecule. This signal is detected by the pLsrA promoter (BBa_K117002), which allows the transcription of LL37 (BBa_K1230001), which is traduced and then translated into the antimicrobial peptide LL37. Once LL37 is expelled by the ArcAB-TolC efflux pump, it can act against H. pylori.

Resistance & Expulsion System

Why Skully coli?

Mexican culture has an interesting relationship with death. There’s a holiday called The Day of the Death, (or Día de muertos in Spanish) in which the deceased are celebrated with colorfully decorated altars with sugar skulls, food, beverages and some of the favorite belongings of the deceased.

The protagonist of this celebration is Death itself. Death has different names (curiously enough, all of them feminine) which include: La Parca, La Huesuda, La Calaca, La Calavera and La Catrina (this last one is a name that Diego Rivera gave to a famous zinc etching by Jose Guadalupe Posada, portraying an “elegant skull”)

An interesting characteristic of La Catrina is that she serves as an intermediary in the death of a “chosen one”, meaning it only takes a specific victim. Our synthetic design intends to modify a bacteria so it can go after specific pathogenic bacteria in vivo. We though of the name Skully coli as a fun cultural analogy that also describes the intention of our system.

PROJECT MENU

Overview

General Design

Wet Lab

BioBricks

Results

Characterization

Notebook

Dry Lab

Modelling

Conclusions

Future Work

References