Team:Paris Bettencourt

About one third of the world’s population has at one point in their life been infected with tuberculosis (TB) causing bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Luckily, nine out of ten infections are asymptomatic and latent but one out of ten progresses to a lethal active disease killing millions of people worldwide. In most cases tuberculosis attacks lungs, invading alveolar macrophages where it lives and replicates. Due to its habitat and the unusual structure and chemical composition of the cell wall many antibiotics are ineffective, making TB treatment difficult and hard to tackle. Additionally, in recent years multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis became an ever increasing problem.

Using Escherichia coli as a model organism we are developing and testing approaches that could lead to eradication of this infectious disease. A drug screen aimed for a specific mycobacterial metabolic pathway, a phage sensor for detection of a specific antibiotic resistance, a TB-ception E. coli which could invade macrophages and kill mycobacteria, and finally a Trojan horse sRNA which could silence the production of antibiotic resistance proteins thus making antibiotic treatment more effective.

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