Team:YAU-China/Description
Description
As one of the important mechanisms of bacterial resistance, bacterial biofilms can lead to incomplete treatment and repeated problems in clinical treatment, which has become a hot issue in recent years.
Burn infection is an important problem in the treatment of burn patients. Among the many pathogenic bacteria causing infection, Pseudomonas aeruginosa is the most important pathogen causing wound infection in burn patients. Due to its intrinsic properties, Pseudomonas aeruginosa is resistant to a variety of antimicrobial agents, in part because of the production of biofilms. The special three-dimensional structure of the biofilm causes a large number of antibacterial drugs to pass through the barrier of the biofilm and acts on the bacteria in the biofilm, so that the antibacterial drugs in the biofilm can not reach the concentration of antibacterial and bactericidal; the unique physiological state of the bacteria in the biofilm is also Causes a decrease in sensitivity to antibacterial drugs, resulting in failure of treatment of antibacterial drugs.
This year we wants to use synthetic biology to destroy biofilms. We overexpressed a hydrolase that decomposes the corresponding exopolysaccharide in Pseudomonas aeruginosa to destroy the wild-type Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilm.Since the extracellular polysaccharide hydrolase is an intracellular enzyme that cannot be secreted into the extracellular environment, the project designed two protocols to induce engineering bacteria to cleave, thereby releasing the extracellular polysaccharide hydrolase into the extracellular environment.In order to solve the safety problem caused by the escape of engineering bacteria, we have designed a series of safety measures to knock out the genes related to biofilm formation in engineering bacteria, and to construct attenuated strains of type III secretion system(T3SS) related genes. In order to prevent engineering bacteria from leaking out, we also used pore membranes smaller than the diameter of engineering bacteria to wrap them.
Through our design, we hope to solve the problems of antibiotic resistance enhancement and treatment repeatability caused by biofilm produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa in clinical treatment, and provide a new idea for the treatment and eradication of chronic bacterial infection.