Team:IIT Madras

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The Problem

Antimicrobial agents like antibiotics and other drugs have served us well for over 70 years. However, they have been used so widely and for so long that the microbes that were supposed to be killed by the antibiotics have adapted to them! Antimicrobial resistance is a serious issue today, and could grow to become even worse in the future. A WHO report in April 2014 states that:

"this serious threat is no longer a prediction for the future, it is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country. Antibiotic resistance—when bacteria change so antibiotics no longer work in people who need them to treat infections—is now a major threat to public health."

Our iGEM project aims to tackle the emerging problem of antibiotic resistance by leveraging the power of natural selection under selective pressure, and synthetic biology. It is known that higher exposure to antibiotics leads to resistance against that antibiotic in bacterial populations.Anti microbial peptides are small protein molecules that have been shown to have anti-microbial activity. They are also also known to exhibit lower tendency to develop antibiotic resistance.Recently, However, it has also been reported that a prolonged exposure to anti-microbial peptides could also lead to the emergence of resistance in bacteria