---

Project Summary

Hello! We are the FBI (Fighting Bacterial Infections) team of Dundee and we are ready to present you our mission.

The mission’s brainstorming process came from monthly meetings in which the team has come together and looked into previous projects and discussed potential products in the area of health, hygiene, pollution and farming. The choice of the final project came from a mutual agreement in which this project was identified as the most interesting and feasible, our iGEM team wanted to accept a challenging project which is achievable and thus will result in a good amount of data which can be modelled and displayed. Our project choice also has a wide public outreach option which is something other projects in the brainstorming sessions were lacking.

Colicins are toxins released by bacteria which inhibit the growth of surrounding bacteria of the same or similar strains, enabling them to minimise their competition. We plan to harness this innate ability, targeting four different bacteria which can result in bacterial infections within the human gastro intestinal tract. This will include common causes of food poisoning such as E.coli, salmonella and shigella as well as helicobacter pylori which causes chronic inflammation of the stomach, potentially leading to ulcer formation and thus increased risk of stomach cancer.

We plan to pinpoint the most specific bacteriocins for each of these bacteria and ligate them into E.coli, along with transcription promoting machinery which is activated at a low pH, so that production is only stimulated when the engineered E.coli reaches the stomach. This way target specificity can be achieved thus protecting the stomach microbes which are important for a healthy gut. With antibiotic resistance becoming a growing strain on public health, alternative treatment to bacterial infection is of increasing importance. This method could improve specificity of treatment while limiting the overuse of antibiotics.

So far we have designed the colicins which we want to use and had them synthesised. Colicins have 3 domains, a receptor, translocation and toxic domain or warhead. We plan to alternate the toxic domains of the colicins to minimise the chance of resistance. We have identified alternative warheads for the colicins, picked promoters and selected some additional parts for our construct.

Our iGEM team is aiming to create a universal biobrick useful for multiple applications. An alternative solution to relieve antibiotic over-usage. Fighting bacterial infections through harnessing bacteria’s innate ability to eliminate their competition. The vision is a marketable powdered product suitable for travel or home usage and useful for combatting bacterial infections of the human GI tract. Dundee’s FBI (Fighting Bacterial Infections) team are ready for action!