Team:UCL/Project

From 2013.igem.org

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<p class="abstract_title">Chemotaxis</p>
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<p class="abstract_title">Insertion</p>
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Microglia readily migrate towards plaques in vivo, but to see if we could increase migration to plaques, we produced a chemoattractant to help them converge.
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The brain is an immune privileged organ and the security of the blood brain barrier makes it difficult to get all but the smallest molecules, such as glucose, from the rest of the body into the brain. This makes inserting our genetic circuit into the brain a trickier task than in most synthetic biomedical projects. Here we examine some plausible methods.
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Revision as of 10:35, 12 September 2013

IGEM: INTELLIGENTLY GENETICALLY ENGINEERED MICROGLIA

Synthetic Biology Fights Alzheimer's Disease

This year, the UCL iGEM team is taking a radical new step with synthetic biology. We intend to explore the potential application genetic engineering techniques on the brain, because it is the site of some of the most subtle, and many of the most devastating medical conditions. Alzheimer’s Disease is a neurodegenerative disease characterised by the loss of recent memory and intellectual functions. We have devised a genetic circuit for transfection into microglia, a novel chassis in which standard assembly has never been used, to boost their ability to break down senile plaques, which are associated with Alzheimer’s disease, as well as to support and protect endangered neurons from microglia-mediated neuroinflammation.

Click the abstracts below to read more.