Project Inspiration and Description

Peptide-detection has been a major topic in the biotechnological community for several decades. The continuous developments in this field continue to improve early diagnosis in a wide range of diseases, setting new trends like personalized medicine or lab-on-a-chip methods which allow for detection of peptides in a wide size range, as well as ensuring high specificity and sensitivity.

These tools are largely available for peptides bigger than 15 kDa, (cite Adeniran) but there are still challenges present in the detection of smaller peptides. Nevertheless, improvements in small-peptide detection would allow for early detection of harmful pathogens even before the immune response is initiated by the body. This would be crucial for detection of viral diseases like African swine fever (ASF), which has a long latency period where the virus is hardly detectable but easily transmitted. In the recent years ASF transformed to a major problem in the pork industry, with multiple outbreaks detected in eastern Europe, forcing several countries to straighten border controls and even stop pork import. (hier INFOS nachgucken)

The prospect of simplifying the ASF detetction procedure, thus mitigating the risk for farmers, wild bore populations, inspired us to address this issue by developing a yeast based biosensor capable of detecting peptides around 1.5 kDa. Extensive research on further possible application made us realize the potential of such a system for detection of various biomarkers for not only viruses but also different metabolic disorders, cancer markers, environmental pollutants as well as for less explored topics like bio-contaminant monitoring and mirror biology structure detection.

Using the yeast Ste2 mating receptor as a backbone we are aiming to develop a directed evolution-based platform for customizing the receptor for detection of a wide range of targets. Furthermore, we are going to explore cell-cell communication for selectivity and sensitivity enhancement in a life-cell bio detector system as well as the possible modification of our project for in-vitro work. In line with iGEM’s focus on solving problems relevant to the wider community we also strive to provide the world with bioinformatical tools for