Team:IISER Kolkata/Parts
Parts Overview
The Biobrick parts we designed are helpful in detecting a particular range of nitric oxide concentration inside the macrophages. When the macrophage is infected with any parasite or pathogen, nitric oxide acts as a signaling molecule to trigger the immune response. We are exploiting this unique ability of the macrophage to identify the infected macrophages.
Our Biobrick is active only in certain range of concentration and are turned off outside this range.
The other set of Biobrick consists of iron chelators that we have proposed to use inside the macrophage to chelate the labile iron. As iron is an important micronutrient for most pathogens and parasites to maintain their physiological functions, by chelating the iron, we can suppress the pathogen infectivity, reducing their pathogenicity, and controlling the spread of the pathogen to different parts of the body as well as combat the pathogen at early stages of infection.
In toto our designed biobrick can produce the iron chelator by sensing the surrounding nitric oxide concentration. This Biobrick can be used in both detection and therapeutics of pathogenic diseases.