Team:KIT-Kyoto/Project

Discription

Leukemia is a serious disease and its remedy has been never found yet. People are afraid of it not only because it is incurable but also it is unpredictable what will happen and when it will happen. Patients have to put up with both of them.

Here we propose the convenient testing kit for leukemia which makes its symptom visible. To accomplish this we are developing leukemia disease models in Drosophila. The usefulness of this kit will be evaluated by characterizing the Drosophila model. This kit may provide a guideline to overcome fear and pain which have not been immeasurable and relieve the fear for leukemia.

Abstract

Mr.D -who will cure leukemia-

Our team, KIT-Kyoto challenges making a leukemia disease model in Drosophila melanogaster. Drosophila is being used as many hereditary disease model because over 70% of known human disease genes have similarities to Drosophila genes.

This year, we focus on a leukemia in which the etiology and the therapy have not been established. We therefore decided to make a leukemia disease model in Drosophila. We insert human leukemia genes into Drosophila genome and also fuse a green fluorescent protein(GFP) with a leukemic protein to monitor its expression in E. coli or Drosophila. We expect that establishing a leukemia disease model in Drosophila will be a first step to determine the etiology and to establish the method of therapy in the future.

Results

We have constructed a Biobrick part, BBa_K579000. This part is useful to make GFP-fusion with various proteins to monitor their expressions. Functional assays to monitor GFP expression in E. coli and Drosophila are ongoing.

We have succeeded to amplify API2-MALT1 cDNA and DIAP2 cDNA. Molecular cloning of these amplified DNA fragments into the P-element plasmid, pUAST-Flag are still underway. After construction of these plasmids, we are going to microinject them into Drosophila embryos to make transgenic flies.