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Team:NTU-Taida
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== PepdEx: Smart Peptide-Based Therapies == | == PepdEx: Smart Peptide-Based Therapies == | ||
Revision as of 06:35, 12 August 2012
PepdEx: Smart Peptide-Based Therapies
- Microbial biotechnology has applications in a wide spectrum of areas, from agriculture, environmental protection to biofuels. The original scheme is simple, for instance manipulate microbes to produce certain chemicals. As a medical-based team, we aim to design microbes to target human diseases. The ultimate goal is to use microbes as a general platform to do complex calculations that respond to conditions in human body, and then administer smart peptide-based therapies.
- We will first use anti-obesity as a proof-of-principle application to this approach. Non-pathogenic E. Coli will live in the intestines and serve as a device to sense the presence of fatty acids, and as an output secret synthetic GLP-1 peptide to suppress the appetite. Appropriate signal peptide and Penetratin will be used to facilitate peptide secretion and intestinal uptake, respectively. Since the intestine is a highly fluctuating environment, we will incorporate a two-filter circuit with anti-noise function, so that the system only responds to sustained stimulus. In addition, due to burden effect bacteria with artificial plasmids will be gradually lost from the population without selection pressure; plasmid segregational instability will also introduce undesirable alterations to the final function for systems encoded in multiple plasmids (as in our case).
- To circumvent this, we also incorporate plasmid stabilization modules including partition system and multimer resolution system. With this general concept we will also explore other pieces of human disease with alternative circuit designs, for instance with an oscillator circuit we can periodically deliver synthetic peptides based on natural secretory pattern or therapeutic regimen.
