Team:Bulgaria/Collaborations
Collaborations
iGEM worldmap
We were very excited when iGEM Hamburg approached us with their wonderful idea for collaboration. During this year we took every opportunity to take part in various events in order to make science more accessible to people without a scientific background. That’s why we were very excited when iGEM Hamburg approached us with their wonderful idea for a collaboration. We created our own easy to understand version of our abstract in Bulgarian and in English.
You can see it below:
Antibiotic resistance is one of the most urgent threats to the public's health. It is the cause of more than 30 000 deaths in the European Union every day. Unfortunately, infections like tuberculosis, pneumonia, gonorrhea, and others, caused by pathogenic bacteria, resistant to the currently used medicines, continue to rise. Finding new antibiotics and making them available on the market is not economically viable because bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics really fast. That’s why antibiotic resistance is recognized as a priority issue by the World Health Organization and the European Commission.
If no action is taken, multiresistant bacteria could cause 10 million deaths each year by 2050. That’s why isolating and researching new components with antimicrobial activity has attracted a lot of interest in the past few years.
One of the most promising candidates for battling pathogens is the natural organic compounds - peptides with antimicrobial activity. They could be isolated from different organisms and take part in the natural defense mechanisms against bacterial, fungal and viral pathogens. Thanks to their unique structure, these peptides could easily be synthesized and tested, using the methods of modern synthetic biology. Our solution is based on developing a new system for the isolation and production of peptides with antimicrobial properties.
This system allows fast, easy and cost-efficient isolation and characterization of these peptides from exotic animal and plant species, whose DNA sequence is already known, as well as their production. The current methods for DNA analysis allow us to identify and test a great number of these compounds after our system is ready. Thanks to our contacts with leading microbiology specialists, we have the opportunity to test the antimicrobial peptides against pathogenic bacteria and choose only the most promising ones. These pathogens are isolated from Bulgarian patients with different diseases and infections.
Mike the Microbe
Our team introduced Mike the Microbe to the youngsters at the European Researcher’s Night. They had a blast coloring him, while we explained how he’s traveling the world from lab to lab. Even though we love Mike, we couldn’t resist doing what is shown in the video. You have to forgive us, our project is about antimicrobial peptides after all!
iGEM Linköping University
We would like to sincerely apologize to iGEM Linköping for leading them on and not completing the collaboration on our end due to unpredicted technical difficulties regarding DNA synthesis.