Team:WHU-China

    The utmost purpose of our project is to emancipate people from suffer of obesity and the restriction of diet. It can be achieved by genetically modifying a resident intestinal microbe, such as E.coli, to create a novel beneficial bacterial which is competent to eliminate the excessive absorption of calorie.
    Fatty acids are our primary targets. The competition between the absorption of the intestine and of the microbe on the surface of intestine is considered as a solution. To prevent the over in-take and accumulation of fatty acids, we will try to engineered microbe that can metabolize the excessive fatty acids in diet efficiently and effectively before they are absorbed by the host. To achieve this, we will overexpress the enzymes responsible for fatty acids degradation under the control of a natural sensor for concentration of fatty acids-- FadR, a repressor for the genes involving in fatty acids degradation. The problem is that we cannot use it directly since the natural promoter it regulates is also under the regulation of other factors responding to other signals. A synthetic promoter is then proposed to tackle the problem. A constitutive promoter is fused to the original binding site of FadR. If such promoter is added in front of the target genes, they can only express when the FadR senses the high concentration of fatty acids and slides off the site on DNA. The gene expression will and will solely respond to high concentration of fatty acids.