Abstract of Our Project:
Illegal usage of narcotics is one of the worst enemies of our modern society.
Throughout the world, many people are suffering from the short and long term effects of these drugs, and the incidence of drug abuse is growing year by year.
Among these drugs, methamphetamine (Known as Crystal Meth) has an increasing role and popularity, as also stated in United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports.*
As iGEMers from Istanbul Technical University, we believe that solving this world-wide problem is strongly related with the design and production of fast, precise and cheap detection technologies. With that in mind, we are in the process of constructing a fluorescent resonance energy transfer (FRET) based whole-cell biosensor for the detection of METH-based drugs by using anti-METH single-chain variable-fragment (ScFv) and fluorescent proteins (CFP-YFP). For double and cross-check, we also used a truncated model of alpha-synuclein molecule, as reported to be a potential meth sensing module, with a newly developed FRET couple, cloverGFP and mRuby2.
We also supported our research by operating molecular dynamic simulations with different models and molecules to support our designs and planned to use simulation data to pre-check our biosensor design.
Last but not least, as a human practice for our project and as to promote illegal-drug research, we tried to expand regulatory rules in Turkey that controls the legal permissions on the usage of captured illegal drugs but not includes research purposes.
What happened next? You will find in our web-site.
