Team:CIDEB-UANL Mexico/HP-MultimediaDiffusion-PublicityBrochures

How do we get to this project?

In September, 2013, the school invited all the 3th semester students to participate in a selection in order to create the team IGEM-CIDEB 2013. A big conference was planned and a lot of students went in order to know a more about the competition and Synthetic Biology.

The filters consisted in 2 phases. The first one was a series of classes with information about Synthetic Biology during October and November. The classes were given by 2 of the instructors. In these classes, each week was taught a topic about Synthetic Biology and it was given an assignment for each topic.

The second phase was about a workshop in the laboratory with practices such as transformation, miniPreparation of DNA plasmidic, electrophoresis and some others, during the second week of January 2013. Based on the participation, assistance and compromise, the final team was selected. After the workshop we started with a brainstorm of ideas about the project. We started with some ideas such as a bacterium with the ability to breakdown DDT, a bacterium that detected cancerous cells and kill them, a bacterium that produce alliinase in order to catalyze the formation of allicin which is a substance produced by the Allium Sativum (garlic) and has pesticide properties[1]. We liked the idea of the alliinase but we found a lot of implications to get the project done. Some of the obstacles were that allicin is a very volatile substance, that we wanted to work with E. coli but allicin has anti-bacterial properties, and other small complications[2]. Due to these problems, we decided to look for another substance but we wanted to work with the same idea of the pesticides.

We found some proteins with pesticide properties that were discovered few years ago and that do not harm the environment. One of them is the Vip3 protein which has a lot of derivatives. We were finding also more obstacles with some of the substances with wanted to work, so we had to continue with the researching. A big problem we had to face is that the Vip3 is about 3000 bp and this is a big size for a protein to be inserted in the plasmids we would be working in. Finally, we choose the substance Vip3ca3 and that’s how we get to the actual project but this is only the first part of the project idea.

1 Chavarrías, Marta. "Ajo en la lucha contra Campylobacter."Eroski Consumer. Fundación Eroski contigo, 16 May 2012. Web. 23 May 2013. .
2 EB Kuettner et al, The active principle of garlic at atomic resolution, J. Biol. Chem. 277 (2002) 46402-46407