Team:NYU-AD/Results

Exterminator Coli

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Achievements

The main objective of the team was to create a self-sustaining mosquito trap using E.coli, and we believe our achievements this summer represents a good starting point towards this goal. In terms of engineering E. coli to biologically produce mosquito attractants and enzymes required to digest mosquito exoskeletons, the team managed to produce and submit 2 new composite parts aimed at constitutively expressing in E. coli the enzymes needed to produce 2 known mosquito attractants -- L-lactic acid and indole. in terms of the physical prototype of the trap, a prototype which makes use of an electrified mesh to instantly kill mosquitoes attracted by the E.coli was build. Our plans for future years include validating each of the constituent Biobrick parts and integrating the engineered E. coli carrying these parts with the physical trap to produce a functional device which will be validated as a whole under laboratory settings.

Some considerations for replicating the experiments are increasing the strength of the attractants (lactic acid and indole) and trying to attract only mosquitoes and not other species of insects, which could have unknown consequences for the ecosystem.

As for the medal criteria, the team believes that it has met the requirements for the silver medal. In addition to the requirements for the bronze medal – registering for iGEM and attending the Giant Jamboree, completing the judging form, creating a team Wiki, presenting a poster and a talk at the iGEM Jamboree, creating a page on the team Wikipage with a clear attribution of each aspect of the project, and documenting at least one BioBrick part of the project and submitting it to the Registry – the team met the additional 3 requirements for a silver medal.

The new Biobrick part that the team submitted to the Registry in fulfilment of the Bronze medal requirement is BBa_K1867024. This part contains the expression cassette for trytophanases A and B, and was intended to increase the production of indole by E. coli carrying expressing it, but was not experimentally validated due to lack of time.

The new Biobrick part submitted in partial fulfilment of the Silver medal requirement is BBa_K1867023. This part contains the expression cassette for L-lactate dehydrogenase. We plan to experimentally validate this part using lactate assay kit MAK064 from Sigma-Aldrich.

In addition to validating our newly submitted part, and in the spirit of building on previous work documented in the registry, the team plans to experimentally validate existing part BBa_K622006 by testing out a novel chitinase assay method based on visualizing degradation of powdered chitin, but was unfortunately unable to complete this by the time this page had to be published. The team also placed BBa_K622006 in an expression cassette by attaching promoters and terminators BBa_K608002 and BBa_B0015 respectively, but was unable to submit this part to the registry because there was insufficient time to switch it to the correct plasmid backbone for submission.

Lastly, the team focused on the investigation into the consequences of disease-carrying mosquitoes and the alleviation of it beyond the scope of simply creating the mosquito trap. We identified mosquitoes as being the most deadly animal on Earth only coming behind humans through research. Seeing that a lot of the infections happen through mosquitoes, especially in countries without the resources to properly exterminate them, the team aimed to make a cost-efficient and self-sustaining solution to the problem.

As this was the inaugural year of participation for NYUAD there were some logistical difficulties, but the team managed to pull through with specialists in different fields including mathematics, biology, chemistry and engineering. We were able to pool together our talents to put together a somewhat gruesomely innovative and effective bacterial solution to a problem we noticed, and had fun with it. Given these conditions the team aimed for a silver medal and thinks it is deserved. There are plans for NYU-AD to send another team to participate in iGEM 2016, and that team, if they so choose, may continue the work that we had planned but were unable to complete due to time constraints.

1st part – tnaa + tnab transcription cassette (will not validate)

2nd aprt – lldd transcription cassette (validate using lactic acid assay)