Team:Peking

Project Description

Tuberculosis, caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, remains one of the world's most serious public health problems. Although tuberculosis is curable and the treatment success rate is high, it is still the second most common cause of death from infectious disease (after HIV). It caused more than 1.3 million deaths annually, and most of the deaths occur in developing countries that are lack of effective identification of those in need of therapy, with an enormous amount of delayed or failed diagnosis.

Case detection is currently the rate-limiting step in disease control. The available Nucleic Acid Detection (NAD) Method is sensitive and fast, but does not reach the requirement of specificity and reliability.

To obviate such problems, Peking iGEM team is developing a novel PC Reporters system that can transform biomarkers of the disease into optical signal. Combined with array design and statistical analysis, the presence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis can be easily verified. It can also be easily used in developing areas with designed hardware development. We believe this new advanced system can turn out as a powerful tool in disease diagnosis, with high specificity and reliability.

POSTER 97 - Zoon 4 - Hall C
PRESENTATION Saturday - Room 302 - 11:30 AM

Thanks for your attention!

Specificity

To improve the specificity of current NAD, a novel sequence visualization system named Paired dCas9 (PC) Reporter has been designed and characterized. Its specificity has been tested on real MTB genome.

Reliability

To deal with challenges from clinical practices, such as strain mutations, sample variations, and other uncontrollable environmental factors, we designed an array to extract sequence information from the entire genome of M. tuberculosis, and improve the reliability of diagnosis. By statistics analysis, we are able to present the read-outs in a quantitative way..

Portability

Noticing that most TB cases occur in developing areas, we built an electronic device (despite prototype), which was portable, affordable, and easy to use for local medical workers.

Bench to Bedside

Come from bedside to bench, and back to bedside again.