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Team:UCLA/Project
From 2013.igem.org
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Contents |
Overall project
In-Vitro Immune System
Diversity is an intrinsic characteristic of nature, and we believe that being able to harness it can serve as a useful tool in synthetic biology.
Bordetella, a genus of small Gram-negative bacteria, frequently changes its surface topography over the course of its life cycle. To successfully infect its constantly-changing host, the BBP-1 phage uses diversity as its weapon of choice. The tip of the virus tail-fibers has a protein called the major tropism-determinant protein (Mtd), which binds to the hosts’ surface and allows the phage to infect it.
Though the general structure of the Mtd protein is constant and is very stable, its active ends are extremely variable. Each phage produces a slightly different structural variant of the protein, with the hope that at least one phage can successfully bind to the host and infect it- akin to the way our immune system produces numerous variants of antibodies so that at least one can bind to the antigen of interest.
The Mtd gene, extracted from the BBP-1 phage genome, has the capability of generating a diverse library of stable proteins. Our team hopes to develop a fully in-vitro system to express and select for Mtd variants of interest.
We plan on first generating a diverse DNA library of the Mtd gene, then using mRNA-display to detect and screen for which variants of the protein can bind to a selected target. In our case, the target will be the surface of E. Coli bacterial cells.
