Project

Malaria is a tropical disease that kills more than 1 million people each year, and no effective cure or vaccine exists yet.

The EPFL iGEM project aims to stop the malaria propagation by acting on its vector: the mosquito. We want to engineer Asaia, a bacterium that naturally lives in the mosquito's gut, to kill or inhibit the Malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, before it can infect the mosquito.

To do so, we will make Asaia express proteins, which specifically bind to plasmodium membrane-proteins. First we will express an immunotoxin that lyses the parasite. Next, we will try to prevent the plasmodium infection by inhibiting surface P-proteins, which are necessary for the fusion of the gametes and the crossing of the intestinal epithelium.

The main advantage of our approach is that it does not wipe out the mosquitoes, which might have unwanted effects. Rather we will only alter their gut flora, which should not have any harmful side effects apart from stopping Malaria transmission.

Asaia is an organism that is easy to grow and manipulate and that is not dangerous for humans. Therefore, we are establishing Asaia as a new chassis so that future iGEM teams can quickly and efficiently engineer new and more potent Asaia strains. This will provide the synthetic biology community with a useful tool in the fight against malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.

About us

We are a group of ten students from various backgrounds (Life Sciences, Microengineering, Computer Science and Physics) united by our interest in synthetic biology. We are looking forward to representing EPFL at the 2010 iGEM competition!

Become a fan of our team on [http://www.facebook.com/pages/EPFL-iGEM/117887404918202 facebook], if you want to receive news from us and follow our progress in the lab. You can also follow us on twitter!!

Acknowledgements

• We thank Prof. Guido Favia and Dr. Claudia Damiani from the University of Camerino for the Asaia strains and their helpful advice and protocols on how to grow and manipulate Asaia.
• We would like to thank Prof. Bruno Lemaitre from EPFL for his advice and the possibility to conduct experiments with drosophila in his lab.
• We thank the Maerkl lab for bearing our presence in the lab. :)
• Many thanks to our sponsors for giving us the opportunity to be a part of this year's iGEM competition.