Welcome to the 2009 Cellular Relay Race

We are currently working on a cell to cell communication system with possible applications in colon cancer treatment and reducing antibiotic resistance of bacteria.

The Team

This is the second year the TUDelft participates in the iGEM competition. The group consists of 7 students, 4 instructors and a lot of advisors from TUDelft willing to help out and think with us when it is necessary. An overview of the people involved and our competences can be found on the team page. With our 7 participants and 4 instructors, we are enthusiastic to start working on our project: Cell to cell communication with re-engineered plasmids.

The Project - Cellular Relay Race

The goal of our project was to create a bacteria that could transfer genetic information into other bacteria, where after some time the genetic message will destroy itself. Three possible applications for this project are

1. Colon cancer treatment -
2. Reducing antibiotic resistance of bacteria - these days, bacterial infections are often treated with antibiotics. Unfortunately, bacteria have the tendancy to pass antibiotic resistance to other bacteria through the process of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_conjugation conjugation], thus making the antibiotics useless. Using our project, it will be possible to use conjugation to our advantage, where bacteria that we will engineer will transfer self-destructive messages to infectious bacteria, causing them to self-destruct. The major advantage of this technique is that bacterial conjugation is very specific to bacteria, so there is no risk that the cells of the host will recieve the self-destruction message.
3. Temporary multi-tasking bacteria - the communication between bacteria can advance through bacterial networks, allowing various bacteria to perform various tasks. Furthermore, since the message self-destroys itself, the bacteria performs the task for some time, and then stops, allowing it to perform another task afterwards.