Overview

Our project idea

The ultimate aim of our project is to contribute to stopping the spread of Malaria. To do so, we hope to genetically modify a bacterium that is naturally present in Anopheles. If we succeed, this will interrupt the malaria cycle in the mosquito, thereby also prevent transmission of the parasite to healthy humans.

Our idea is to engineer Asaia, a bacterium that is naturally present in the mosquito's intestinal tract.

This bacterium would express an immunotoxin and specific proteins to kill the P. falciparum or prevent its entry into the epithelium.

The immunotoxin and the proteins could be able to stop the infection of Anopheles mosquitoes by P. falciparum.

Our host bacterium Asaia is an organism that is not only easy to grow and genetically manipulate but also naturally present in the ecosystem. We aim to establish Asaia as a new chassis to give future iGEM teams the opportunity to quickly and efficiently engineer new and more potent Asaia strains in the fight against malaria and other mosquito borne diseases.

So... ASAIA is the pink power against malaria.....

For a playful overview of our project, you can watch our awesome movie iGEM EPFL movie

Our results

We established Asaia as a new chassis by providing detailed tech-sheets on how to manipulate it. We constructed several biobricks with which selected proteins to block malaria infection of mosquitoes can be produced. We also made Asaia-specific biobricks, such as the CFP construct to test expression. These basics will allow future iGEM teams to use Asaia and manipulate it to fight mosquito-bourne diseases.

The expression of the proteins intended to block P. falciparum was tested in E. coli. The tests showed that the immunotoxin is expressed and it also appears in the supernatant, which is evidence for secretion. We could not show expression of the P-proteins, probably due to the AT-rich sequence.

Furthermore we tested the persistence of Asaia in D. melanogaster to see if it could be used as an alternative host to facilitate research. The results showed that Asaia is not persistent and we assume that it is because Asaia is very specific to mosquitoes.

For further steps of our project we established a collaboration with the Pasteur institute in Paris that works on mosquitoes.