Team:USTC-China/Project/futurework

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Revision as of 10:00, 3 October 2011

Artificial Innate Immunity System(AIIS)

Background

    From mid May to June, enteropathogenic E.coli brings a big panic to many different European countries. Why such an ordinary bacteria as E.coli can lead to a clinical catastrophe and kill a lot of people? The answer may be complicate, but the most important reason is that we can not find out the pathogens rapidly and can not apply the effective treatments.To solve this problem, we try to use the normal E.coli, which keep the symbiotic relationship with us humanbeings, to be a safety weapon to defend ourselves against pathogens.

Figure1.Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli(left) brings us a big panic(right)

Purpose

    Using reprogrammed intestinal bacteria as a safety weapon to destroy the pathogens which invade the intestinal mucosal system.

Principle

    As shown in Figure2, When pathogens invade the intestinal epithelium ,they will release some kind of chemical signal. After the reprogrammed intestinal bacteria capture this signal, such signal can activate the expression of the function gene ,then it will drive the reprogrammed intestinal bacteria to move toward the infection site from the original colony. Then the moving reprogrammed bacteria will establish a new colony at the infection site, these bacteria will express some lethal proteins to kill pathogens by self-destruction, or spread some toxic small molecules to destroy the pathogens then start self-destruction, and the original colony will remain.

(a)

(b)

Figure2.Reprogrammed intestinal bacteria move towards the target and establish a colony(a),then destroy the taget(b)

Theoretical Design

1.AI(Auto Inducer）as a chemical signal

By using the device from the article Engineering microbes to sense and eradicate Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a human pathogen (Figure3.), we can modify our original design to achieve the function which we have described before.(As shown in Figure4.)

Figure3.

Figure4.