Who has never suffered from sleep disorders ?

Background

A 2008 report by the INPES, a French public institute, has shown that 45% of the 25-45 year-old population considers that they do not sleep enough. This lack of sleep causes a fair bit of negative impacts : decrease of focus, weakened immune system, cardiovascular disease risk increase ... Even if these statistics are high, today's medical knowledge is not sufficient enough when it comes to healing people who suffer from sleep disorders. A classic example would be sleeping pills for chronic insomnia. However, they only treat the symptoms, not the source. This drew our attention, enough to provoke unanimity for this project within our team.

Objectives

This year, iGEM Bordeaux aims to study DSIP, a sleep-inducing peptide which seems to be promising for the given dilemma. In order to understand in which mechanisms this peptide is involved, it will be produced by the bacteria Escherichia coli and then injected in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. It would be interesting to directly produce this peptide in C. elegans too.

Another aspect is to control the nematode's sleep pattern. On the one hand, we want to make a photo-inductible system that can be used on sleep genes' promoters. On the other hand, we aim to create a new tool to modify the sleep genes using epigenetics the sleep genes : EpiCrispr. Based on the CRISPR-CAS9 concept, we want to design it according to two strategies : both will use a fusion technique between a methylase and CAS9, but the second approach is inspired on Sun-Tag technique.

Our final goal is to compare the two approaches - the photo-inductible system and the EpiCrispr system - and see which one would be easy to handle for the C.elegans's sleep control.