Team:Ruperto Carola/Description
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 [1] , but there are still challenges present in the detection of smaller peptides. Because of this, improvements in small-peptide assays would allow the early detection of harmful pathogens, even before the immune response is initiated by the body. Our first thoughts turned towards neglected viral diseases like African swine fever (ASF) affecting pigs. Because of its long latency period, the virus is hardly detectable but easily transmitted in the early stages. Its impact on farmers is also growing - in recent years, ASF has grown into a major concern for the pork industry, with multiple outbreaks detected in eastern Europe, forcing several countries to tighten border controls and even stop pork import.
The prospect of simplifying the ASF detetction procedure, thus mitigating the risk for farmers, and wild boar populations, is what first inspired us to address the issue of 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
- Target selection – software that helps you to choose the appropriate peptide target that would be accessible for the receptor
- Modelling of the receptor ligand-interactions and definition of target receptor structure Planning of optimal intermediate steps for your substrate walking based directed evolution
- Adapting the established wet-lab protocols for your needs