Team:St Andrews/description

From 2011.igem.org

Project Description
Antimicrobial Peptides have been an area of great interest for many years. They form part of an evolutionarily conserved innate immune response.
For the 2011 St Andrews iGEM project we are creating a ‘kill switch’ where we will be inserting a gene (protogrin-1) coding for Anti-Microbial Peptides (AMP’s) into E. Coli. AMP’s cause the death of bacterial cells by displacement of lipids and alteration of the membrane structure. The idea is to then use different promoters to switch on the expression of these proteins in certain conditions (we envisage that this would have many practical applications, some of which we hope to maybe explore later on).