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Team:NYMU-Taipei
From 2013.igem.org
Overview of 2013 NYMU iGEM Team Project
To save bees from Nosema ceranae infection, the culprit of colony collapse disorder (CCD), NYMU-Taipei iGEM team has created the so-called Bee. coli from Escherichia coli MG1655, which naturally resides in bees. The Bee. coli is designed to work successively as follows: (1) Bee. coli continuously secretes mannosidase to inhibit the sprouting of N. ceranae spores. (2) if the bee is infected with N. ceranae, the fungus-killing-circuit with a positive feedback design will be turned on to wipe out N. ceranae. (3) if these designer weapons should fail to conquer N. ceranae, a bee-suicide-operon will be activated to kill the infected bees but save their companions.
Besides, a light-inducible lysis system is created to ensure our Bee. coil only lives inside of the bee. In addition, we have used encapsulation as the method to send our Bee. coli into the bee. Since the capsule will only dissolve in a bee’s gut, our Bee. coli will not wantonly spread out.
Achievements
1. We have documented and sent 23 new standard BioBrick Parts or devices to part registry.
2. We have done the experiments to prove that at least 16 parts or devices that we sent really work as expected. The results are shown in each parts’ registry page.
6. We have constructed a T7 polymerase mediated positive feedback circuit.
9. We have gone to bee farms and help the beekeepers to check if their bees were infected by Nosema ceranea. 10. We created primers to identified Nosema ceranea. This provides a fast and precise way to find out Nosema ceranea besides barely using microscope.
