Team:HKUST-Hong Kong/content.html

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.