Team:Dundee Schools
Project Description
Every month running from February 2016 our team attended monthly meetings to discuss our project and brainstorm ideas, allowing us to talk about what we would like to work on throughout the summer. During these meetings we all came up with various ideas and eventually managed to narrow it down to the idea of targeting water-borne bacterial infections affecting developing countries.
Two of the main bacterial infections caught in these countries are shigellosis and cholera; shigellosis is an infection caused by the bacterium Shigella and cholera by Vibrio cholerae. Both are usually caught by ingesting water or food contaminated with the respective bacteria and both conditions also have similar symptoms; 163 million cases of Shigellosis are recorded annually in third-world countries, 1 million of which proving fatal. In addition, cholera causes around 100 000 deaths in these countries per year.
We have decided to combat these infections by using RNA interference; this will hopefully be a cheaper, faster and more accessible solution than current cures. Since beginning our project full-time in June, the dry team have contacted various individuals and charities to get a range of opinions on our proposed method and have started developing the wiki; meanwhile, the wet team have begun work in the lab.
