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Team:Guelph/Team
From 2008.igem.org
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| The University of Guelph is a mid sized, comprehensive University that is generally regarded as Canada's agricultural university and outstanding in the field of life sciences. Our university motto is actually, "Changing lives, improving life." Add the words, "using synthetic biology" to that motto and you've got a university which was made to participate in iGEM.
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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. In an exciting partnership with iGEM Calgary Ethics, they are helping us explore issues associated with this technology and potential target markets which might benefit from our project.
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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