Team:TUDelft/Project

The onset of spring brings with it the sweet fragrance of the tulips heralding a new year and new beginnings. For TU Delft iGEM, it meant the formation of a new team to compete in the 2012 version of the prestigious International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) synthetic biology competition to be held at the MIT in Boston, to build on the successes of the 2009 "Bacterial Relay Race" team which won the award for the best information processing project and the 2010 "Alkanivore" team which was one of the 6 finalists and which also won the best presentation award for providing a green solution for oil spills.
This year 9 students from TU Delft and 2 students from Leiden along with 7 advisors come together to form team "Snifferomyces" with a goal of providing sniffing capabilities to yeast to achieve rapid and a cost effective diagnosis system for Tuberculosis.
Synthetic biology is a new area of biological research and technology that encompasses a variety of different approaches, methodologies and disciplines, combining the areas of science and engineering with a common goal to design and construct new biological functions and systems not found in nature.
The iGEM which began in January of 2003 is the premiere undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition in which student teams are given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, to work on it at their own schools over the summer. They use these parts and new parts of their own design, to build biological systems and operate them in living cells thus providing an exceptionally motivating and an effective teaching method.
The 2012 project of the TU Delft iGEM team, draws inspiration from the sniffer rats which can be trained to sniff out unexploded landmines and tuberculosis. Tuberculosis infects around 8 million people a year and kills approximately 2 million. Drugs to treat tuberculosis have been around for a long time, so a rapid diagnosis system can help curb the spread of the disease.
The goal of this project is to develop a microbial based system for detection. Several systems have been characterized, e.g. the I7 receptors in rats which could be coupled to microbial systems like the GPRS system in S. cerevisiae. Using bioinformatics and molecular tools the team, plans to develop a library of receptor proteins to improve the sensitivity and selectivity of gaseous detection. A working detection system not only has applications for sensing, but also communication in non-aqueous environments between different species and kingdoms.
Using the system described above the proposal is to build a device that aids in the rapid and cost effective detection of tuberculosis. The team also plans to achieve a proof of principle for gaseous yeast / E.coli communication on plates.