Team:AITM-Nepal/Overview

The main cause of infection from any kind of pathogen is common indeed. The inefficient immune activation and working is the step after which there is the case for the disease progression. But what if we could avert the disease before we know we have harvested disease or any infection.

This is the theme of the project. We aim to engineer E. coli so that it will boost the immune activation by selectively upgrading the Interferon type one molecules production inside human body.

There are different parts for the project as;

• Part 1: Since we are working to activate the immune system, we do it by activating the Toll like receptor 8 which resides in endosomal membrane of mammalian cells. Thus for the result and verification of our device we would need the cell line which is transfected by TLR-8 gene and also with the reporter system. Along with the TLR-8, we would also need the verification step inside which we would measure the production of Interferon type -1 family production. Thus we devised another circuit which will provide us the qualitative analysis of the Interferon type -1 family production. For that we devised a promoter which would only be activated by Interferon type -1 family components and thus planting a reporter system like Green fluorescence protein gene downstream of it, we could reliably say that whenever we get the fluorescence there must be the production of Interferon type -1 family components. In this way we devised two different circuits to transfect HEK-293 cell line for stable expression. This device making and functionality testing comes under Part -1 of our project.