Team:Stockholm/Project Idea/Future applications

Future applications

We believe that this project has great potential. In our point of view it is a new and innovative method when dealing with many skin disorders. It would have been great if we had more time to test the skin penetrating capabilities of our proteins bound to cell penetrating peptides (CPPs) derived from E.coli. However there was a shortage of experimental time. We still hope that this project will open up doors and possibly new methods in the field of bacteria theraphy and synthetic biology. In addition we wish that more research focus would highlight skin disorders such as Vitiligo in combination with the vast capacity of synthetic biology.

Future work would have been for us to succesfully purify our fusion proteins. These are made up of proteins of interest when targeting Vitiligo and the three different types of CPPs that have caught our eyes. The purified fusion proteins is supposed to be applied both on skin cells, such as keratinocytes and melanocytes on a dish, and also on artificial skin. This would allow us to investigate the penetrating capability of the fusion proteins on both cell and skin level. This is a crucial moment to understand since it opens up for further experiments to take place. The approach for the penetrating experiments is by immunohistochemistry on cells and skin layers. An interesting follow up on this would be to have the bacteria produce and secrete the proteins with CPPs out of the bacteria by skipping the extra step in protein purifications. This would be a very optimal set up since we would not need laborative costs related to protein purification.

We would need a success in either protein purification or secretion of the proteins with CPP. This should be followed by a fortunate cell and skin penetratration experiment. Then we could have experiments focusing on protein activity. It would be interesting to analyze how well the proteins activity is preserved during the penetration of the skin barrier and into the different skin layers.

It is unfortunate that we did not have more experimental time to spend on our research project. However it is also important for us to emphasize all the experience we all have learned from this journey.

Thank you for this opportunity iGEM, supervisors and the the Faculty of Science at Stockholm University!