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 signalling molecule to trigger the immune response. We are exploiting this unique ability of the macrophage to identify the infected macrophages.
Our Biobrick parts activate at a particular concentration of nitric oxide concentration and get turned off after the nitric oxide concentration reaches a particular greater value.
The second part of your Biobrick part helps in chelating the iron ions inside the macrophage. As iron is a very important micronutrient for most pathogens and parasites to maintain their physiological functions, by chelating the iron, we can suppress the pathogen infectivity, their pathogenicity, and control the spread of the pathogen to different parts of the body as well as suppress the pathogen at earlier stages of their infection.
The main function of our Biobrick is to produce the iron chelator by sensing the surrounding nitric oxide concentration. This Biobrick can be used in both detection and therapeutics of pathogenic diseases.