Team:WLC-Milwaukee

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Project Description

For this year's project the WLC-Milwaukee team is looking into phage therapy. Specifically we are looking for phages specific to the outer-membrane efflux pore protein tolC. tolC analogs are found in most gram-negative bacteria, and they have been implicated as an essential protein in an efflux-based resistance mechanism to certain types of antibiotics. Our project involves expressing tolC homologs from infectious strains of bacteria in a tolC knockout strain of E coli. We are using these transgenic E coli to search for bacteriophages specific to our selected gastrointestinal tract pathogen's versions of tolC. Our hope is that the phages specific for a pathogen's tolC can be used in combination with an antibiotic generally resisted via an efflux mechanism to put the pathogenic bacteria in a lose-lose dilemma: bacteria which try to efflux the antibiotics will expose themselves to the pathogen-specific phage, while those which do not express TolC will be weakened to the antibiotic therapy.