Team:Paris Bettencourt/Potential Application

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There are many potential application of such a research. Our project is located at the very beginning of the investigation, but such a mechanism opens opportunities so far non foreseen in biotechnologies and drug conception. Many applications are still to be found, but we can already propose very new and innovative ones in the field of metabolism engineering and drug design.

Medical application

The nanotube communication, if efficient, is one potential mechanism that would allow a population of infectious bacteria to survive an antibiotic treatment. Indeed, if a resistance appears, such mechanism helps the bacterias to resist together even before a plasmid has the time to be transfered from one cell to another.

A treatment blocking the formation of the nanotubes in gram positive bacterias would be an efficient drug to help the patient no to develop resistance to the antibiotic he is taking, in the case of long infections. It could be given in complement with the standards antibiotics.

For the moment, the genes at the origin of the nanotube formation are unknown. It's a lot of fundamental research ahead to find the proteins and then use rational design approaches on their structure.

Metabolic engineering

Implanting a new metabolic pathway into a cell often leads to rejection of the pathway, due to the toxicity of the compounds and the over expression of the metabolic enzymes. This is an heavy burden for a cell to carry.

In order to lighten the costs for the cell and though the rejection, several labs works of creating artificial bacteria consortiums, each of the present species is carrying one step of the reaction. This approach presents the problem that each compound has to pass through the membrane efficiently. Other scientists, linking artificial giant vesicules with artificial metal tube try to build compartimented micro-fabrics for chemical compound. The problem is that it is not living, and the enzymes have to be encapsulated. Second, it is difficult to build and not stable with time.

Controlling the nanotubes formation would be a great progress in the micro-factory metabolic engineering. Connecting the cells together through the nanotubes, each cell carrying one step of the reaction would combine the advantage of the two previously mentioned techniques without their drawbacks.

A lot of work has to be done before we reach such control, but our iGEM project can be a significant step in this direction.