Team:SDU-Denmark/Description
Description
Bacto-Aid
Our project, Bacto-Aid, faces the growing problems of both plastic pollution and the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Bacto-Aid is a sustainable and preventive band-aid that consists of recombinant spider silk integrated with antimicrobial peptides. The plastic we attach the spider silk to is biodegradable and made in our own lab as well.
The spider silk is chosen due to its angiogenic properties and proliferative effect on keratinocytes. This helps the wound that Bacto-Aid is applied on to heal faster.
The bacteriocins are the antimicrobial peptides in our hybrid silk. There haven’t been evolved resistance towards them and therefore we have chosen to work with them. They work bactericidal through pore formation and interference with intracellular enzymatic reactions of specific target bacteria.
The biodegradable plastic (PHB) is a synthezised poly-β-hydroxy butyrate polymer that is non-toxic and has a high oxygen-permeability (Jambunathan & Zhang, 2016). By introducing a PHB secretion system into an E. coli plasmid we can increase the yield from existing plastic producing BioBricks.
We chose this project since we early on decided to do something with synthetic spider silk, which already had been the interest of other iGEM teams. We then found an article that had fused synthetic spider silk to human defensins which had proved to have antimicrobial effect (Gomes, Leonor, Mano, Reis & Kaplan, 2011). The idea of making PHB a part of our project evolved from the desire to have an influence on solving the growing problem of plastic pollution. Bacto-Aid was the perfect project to make our two wishes come to live.
In the field of science scientific reproduction is one of the most important aspects when confirming a hypothesis or theory. iGEM follows this specific scientific virtue by making it a part of both the bronze and gold criteria: the demands imply working with other team’s work. We took it further trying to reproduce parts of earlier iGEM team’s work: the 2015 UCLA team, the 2012 Tokyo Tech team, the 2014 Imperial College London and the 2015 Standford Brown team.
