One of the main goals of our project is to establish Asaia as a new chassis. Hence, we will make a lot of characterization experiment, so that other teams will be able to quickly and efficiently engineer new and more potent Asaia strains.

We chose the bacteria Asaia, because of its high rate of transmission between the mosquito's population (vertical, from parents to offspring ; and horizontal during reproduction) and because it is naturally present in mosquito's gut. We believe it could be a really good instrument in the fight against malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases. In this page we want to summarize the main properties coming out from our experiments.

Doubling Time

We measured the growth curve of Asaia at differents pH (ph2-pH7) and at 30°C and 37°C to figure out the optimal growth conditions. We found that the optimal Temperature is 30°C, and the optimal pH is 5. At this conditions we measured a doubling time of 2h40min.

Antibiotic resistance

We are actually characterizing Asaia's properties against various antibiotics. We've already noticed that Asaia is naturally resistant to Amphicillin (Amp) and Chloroamphenicol (Cm) to the standard concentrations for E.Coli. We are testing right now the behaviour of Asaia to 7 others antibiotic like Tetracyclin (Tet) and Kanamycin (Kan) at various concentrations.

Compatibility with E.Coli

We noticed that the Origin of replication of Asaia is compatible with E.Coli, but the opposite is not true. The origin of replication of E.Coli isn't compatible with Asaia. Thus, we had to add Asaia's origin of replication to all our parts so they would function in both Asaia and E.Coli