Project

Anti-Fungal Proteins

Previously an iGEM team, Acton Boxborough Regional High school has joined BioBuilder! Our iGEM idea last year was ambitious and imaginitive but too advanced for us to complete. This year, we aim to pursue a more pragmatic goal so we can design a complete plasmid that is useful and functional. In pursuit of this goal, our BioBuilder team has voted to focus on antifungal proteins. Plants have developed a staggering variety of methods to destroy fungus while keeping symbiotic bacteria intact so we should be able to make our plasmid with their genes. When we have found the gene for an antifungal protein, we will design a plasmid around it that can be cloned into E. coli to create a truly formidable defense against pathogenic fungus. The protein from our transgenic E. coli can be used to defend plants that do not produce enough of such a protein to protect themselves from infection.

In other words, we can use take advantage of an eternity of evolution to make a ridiculously overpowered chimera that makes evil fungi go extinct.

Project Selection

We had 2 different, competing ideas: the antifungal idea and denitrification. Nitrification is a major problem that can lead to methemoglobinemia, or "blue baby syndrome." However, upon further research, we discovered that we would have to change art of the electron transport chain to use nitrates instead of oxygen gas. This was too complicated for us, so we went with antifungal proteins.