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Revision as of 22:05, 18 September 2015

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Scaling Up


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Background

In order to target mental health issues such as depression and anxiety in a responsive manner it is necessary to design sensors that respond only when triggered by specific biomarkers. This means that mood sensing probiotics designed by our team will only release neuroactive compounds when a patient actually goes through clinical depression or a panic attack instead of being constitutively active. This is achieved by transforming bacteria with plasmids with signal sensing promoters upstream of the effector genes.



Infamous Insidious Inflammation

Clinical depression is likely caused by a chronic low grade-response to inflammation [Link] M. Berk et al. So depression is an inflammatory disease, but where does the inflammation come from? in European Journal for Medical Research, 2013 [1]. Although the pathway from inflammation to depression is complex and not fully understood it has been shown that the immune response is often accompanied by symptoms such as oxidative and nitrosative stress in the gut.