Team:Oxford/Experiments

Experiments

Introduction

Our enzymatic approach to the treatment of urinary tract infections (UTIs) is centred on the design of a "pathogen killing" engineered microbial host containing three key features:

  • Constant secretion of biofilm-degrading enzymes - degrading the biofilms of the pathogenic bacteria reduces their resistance towards antibiotics
  • Production and intracellular accumulation of enzymes that can kill both the pathogenic bacteria and our engineered microbial host upon release into the extracellular medium
  • A quorum sensing mechanism that triggers the release of the antibacterial enzymes in the presence of pathogenic bacteria

Through our experimental work with secretion assays, biofilm assays, and cell-killing assays we were able to obtain preliminary data suggesting that the BioBrick parts which we designed to allow our microbial host to produce the relevant biofilm-degrading enzymes and bacteria-killing enzymes are indeed able to function as expected individually.