Team:Pitt/Protease/Project
Protease Sensor
Project Background
The second sensing system we have designed relies on transcriptional repressors. By creating a synthetic repressor that gets cleaved by a specific protease, the extract we create will be sensitive to the protease. This can be used to detect breast and colorectal cancer biomarkers such as MMP-2 and MMP-9 in patients' urine.(Coticchia 2011) This project uses several concepts to sense proteases. First of all, this system relies on a two-hybrid repressor previously described in some detail. (Di Lallo 2001) Secondly, instead of using the two-hybrid as a way of detecting the interaction between two proteins, we created fusion proteins that contain both parts of the two-hybrid repressor. This allowed us to insert a linker sensitive to specific proteases, which would then inactivate the repressor, and allow transcription of the reporter to occur, as shown in the image below.![](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/1/14/Pitt4.png)