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Team:Guelph/Team
From 2008.igem.org
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| - | |You can write a background of your team, members, etc or something else that might be interesting. | + | |You can write a background of your team, members, etc or something else that might be interesting about the city, ideas, journal clubs, etc. |
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Revision as of 01:11, 2 August 2008
| Home | The Team | The Project | Parts | Notebook | Modeling | Links |
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Contents |
(Under construction - Abstract re: Team)
| You can write a background of your team, members, etc or something else that might be interesting about the city, ideas, journal clubs, etc. | 
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| Plants and animals are found to contain huge numbers of bacteria and fungi that help with nutrient absorption, produce beneficial compounds, fight off pathogens, or often are even pathogens themselves. We are interested in taking advantage of some of these microbes to deliver transgenic payloads for the benefit or modification of the host organism. These might be called GM endosymbionts. On the human side, we would like to introduce the carotendoid metabolic genes from a well studied soil microbe called Erwinia urodevora into human probiotic microbes which will survive and colonize the intestine for stable production of the essential human nutrient, pro-vitamin A. Time permitting, we will attempt to enhance carotenoid accumulation by increasing plasma membrane sink by overexpression of the fumarate reductase operon. Millions of humans suffer from vitamin A deficiencies across the world, resulting in blindness and death which could be mitigated by symbitic production of this important vitamin. We will also attempt to get corn endosymbionts to produce pro-vitamin A; a function usually performed by the plant itself.
A more basic project will focus on RNAi signal delivery by a corn plant endosymbiont to silence corn genes. Most euaryotes react to double stranded RNA by copying it and chopping up any mRNA with the same sequence, while prokaryotes do not seem to posses the same response. Since bacteria like K. pneumonii live in large stable populations within corn plants, it is believed that as individual bacteria grow, die and lyse within the plant host, they will release RNAi transcripts into the sensitive host during the entire life cycle of the plant, which will silence the targeted gene and show a phenotype indicating gene function. Bacterial Induced Gene Silencing (BIGS) will be a useful, quick, and stable alternative for plant functional genomic research. | 
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Who we are
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What we did
(Provide proper attribution for all work)
