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Team:BIT/Notes
From 2013.igem.org
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As we all know that the antibiotic has been widely used all over the world in order to prevent bacterial infection. Thus here comes the problem of increased resistance among bacteria which evolve under the pressure of long-term exposure to antibiotics. Now we need to use the antibiotics more often than before to meet the requirement of medical treatment and there are even some antibiotics that have been no longer helpful because the abuse of antibiotics.
The abuse of antibiotics is the main cause of the resistance and can also lead to dysbacteriosis, both of which will damage the wellbeing of people. Thus there are good reasons that we should raise our awareness of this issue. While we do know about the intake of some antibiotics through medical treatments, the passive absorption of antibiotics from diet often remains unknown. That’s where the dairy product, by which I mean our subject, milk, comes to our attention. There are some traditional ways to detect the antibiotics in milk, but these ways are usually of high-price and require for certain equipment that is only available in labs. It’s very hard for an ordinary family to judge whether their milk is qualified and safe in terms of antibiotic residual. So here comes our idea of using engineering bacteria that can react with the antibiotics and express eGFP as signal to detect antibiotics in milk. Because the florescence is so weak that we cannot detect it, we designed the amplifier and controller so that the bacteria can express more eGFP than before. Furthermore, to make the detection more convenient, we also introduced a miniature system which includes a microchip and a small electronic detector. By injecting the bacteria and sample solution in the chip and assemble the chip into the electronic detector, we can finish the combination of the bacteria, chip and equipment. Then we just need to open the activate light, detect the florescent intensity, build a mathematic model and we can get the antibiotic concentration in milk. With this system, we are able to detect the concentration of nearly all kinds of antibiotics as we want. |
