Staphylococcus aureus

Our goal is to create an E. coli strain, which inhibits Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) biofilm formation in wounds by producing RNA III-inhibiting-peptide (RIP).

S. aureus is one of the largest causes of hospital infections, each year infecting millions of people around the globe. S. aureus is normally commensal, but can create bacterial biofilms on implanted medical devices and in post-operational wounds. Biofilm is becoming increasingly hard to treat, as a result of growing resistance to many types of antibiotics.

By manipulating E. coli to express a synthetic RIP peptide tagged with an export signal, we hope to reach this goal. RIP has been shown to hinder the quorum-sensing processes essential for biofilm development in S. aureus, thereby making it harder for the bacteria to spread and cause infections. We also propose making a bandage that contains our engineered bacteria behind a semipermeable membrane, allowing only small peptides such as RIP to pass through, into the wound.

We hope to show that biological machines could be used to fight different kinds of bacterial infections intelligently, to contribute with our RIP and export-signal parts and by better characterization of the older parts we've used.

Our Project | Background for the project

SDU Denmark. From left to right: Ann, Mike, John, Helle, Martin, Anna, Julius, Kir, Marc and Anne.

We are eight students from the [http://www.sdu.dk University of Southern Denmark], who shared a common wish to explore synthetic biology and decided to start the first iGEM team at our university.

We are from diverse backgrounds such as nano-bio-science, molecular biology and medicine.

Together with six advisors, we are spending the summer getting to grips with the up’s and down’s in synthetic biology, the lab, how to organize the project and everything in between.

Our Team | [http://igem.sdu.dk See what we're up to on our blog]

We would love to get as much feedback as possible, both on our project and other work as well. Feel free to write, criticize or just say hallo.

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Announcements

Sep. 16: We're featured in this months [http://intern.sdu.dk/enheder/natur/PerspektivMening/PerspektivMening3sept2009.pdf Perspektiv & Mening], a magazine at SDU.

Sep. 10: We got our 4-brick-part together. Wohu. Now we can start testing.

Aug. 26: [http://igem.sdu.dk/?p=314 Loading buffer on trail] at our blog. And we are getting ready to insert our different bricks into a backbone, yeah.

Aug. 25: More profiles on our team page.

Aug. 20: We updated the team page with most of our advisors.

Aug. 19: Wohu! Anna has returned after a five week trip to Africa where she helped deliver babies in Kenya. Good to have you back! Also we wrote about our [http://igem.sdu.dk/?p=307 ligation troubles on our blog].

Aug. 17: We updated the wiki with more protocols, our diary and changed the layout a bit.

Aug. 14: Julius left us to study at [http://www.northcarolina.edu/ University of North Carolina]. We miss you already, Mr. Misty Forrest Dragon!

Aug. 11: Kir's birthday! Happy birthday!

Check out the other teams

Be sure to check out all the other teams that are competing in this years iGEM.

Sponsors