Team:HKUST-Hong Kong/content.html

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Revision as of 13:28, 4 October 2011

Hello!
Welcome to HKUST Team Wiki Page!

We are the 2011 iGEM team from the Hong Kong University of
Science and Technology (HKUST).
This is the fourth year for HKUST to
participate in this international synthetic biology competition.

Thanks to our experienced instructors, considerate advisors and
every team member from HKUST iGEM 2011 family, we enjoyed
a fantastic summer working cooperatively and effectively towards
our goal.

You may visit our Gallery to see how's our team was doing the lab.

Our Project

Overview | Data Page
Experiments and Results
Strain construction | Culture tests | Modeling
Miscellaneous
Future Plans | Notebook

iGEM Resources

Acknowledgements
The Team
iGEM Member List | Contributions
Achievements
Medal Requirements | BioSafety
Biobricks
Master List & Characterization Data

Human Practice

Workshop | Survey

Project Abstract

It has often been assumed that when an antibiotic is introduced to a bacterial community, only cells that carry resistance genes will survive and proliferate. However, recent findings have suggested that communities with a mixture of highly resistant (HR) and less resistant (LR) individuals are able to survive through ‘charity’ by HR individuals, which support LR individuals through indole signalling.

Our team aims to interfere with this signalling through introducing a disruptor E. coli into the bacterial community. This new strain will be able to degrade indole using a mutated toluene-4-monooxygenase (T4MO). We hypothesize that LR cells in the community deprived of indole will undergo eliminated at lower antibiotic concentrations. If this demonstration is successful, indole degradation might prove to be a possible strategy in boosting antibiotics effectiveness in medical practice against bacteria that rely on such signalling.

Along the way, we will also create a new strain of E. coli that utilizes an essential gene (nadE) as the selection marker for transformation, allowing antibiotics-free transformation and plasmid maintenance for regular laboratory manipulation. This new transformation method can be adopted for future iGEM teams, reducing their use of antibiotics without increasing the complexity of the transformation protocol.

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