Team:IISER Berhampur/Parts

IISER-BPR IGEM

PARTS

The proposed constructs that will be generated as a part of project FRaPPe are tabulated below.


BADA SA TABLE KA IMAGE SAYANTANI BANA DENA, GYAN REMIND !!!!


.


Background

Dengue is a mosquito borne disease which is caused by the dengue virus. Dengue manifests itself with symptoms such as mild rashes and the fever dies down after a few days. However in 0.5 to 1% of the cases, it ends up being life-threatening where it can lead to the deadly Dengue Haemorrhagic Fever (DHF) or Dengue Shock Syndrome (DSS), where the body loses water very rapidly (Sanyaolu et al., 2017). The virus shows a diverse clinical picture making accurate diagnosis difficult and has been declared by the World Health Organization as a “major global public health challenge in the tropic and sub tropic nations”. The statistics reveal an ominous picture.


  • The incidence of dengue has increased 30 times over the last 50 years.
  • Up to 390 million infections are estimated to occur annually around the world, and it is endemic to 128 countries now, putting over half of the world population at risk.
  • It is the tenth highest cause of both mortality and morbidity in developing countries and the leading cause of death in children below 15 years old in some South-East Asian countries (Global Health Data Exchange Results Tool, IHME, 2017).
  • In India, certain states which had no reported cases before, including Odisha have now been reporting a widespread incidence of dengue. The surge in cases are attributed to several factors including increased population growth rate, global warming, spike in urbanization, and lack of health care amenities. A lack of awareness on the part of the masses and higher authorities is reflected in poor and inefficient mosquito control programs which aggravates the issue.

To gain a quantitative understanding of the severity of the problem, we looked into the epidemiology of the dengue virus. By mining data from several published papers and national archives, we examined past trends and the increasing incidence of Dengue fever.


After gaining a comprehensive understanding of the past, we tried to understand what the future holds. To see how serious the issue is we tried predicting the burden of the disease using a modified Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) plot.



What did we see ? The number of infected people reaches a maximum of around 3,50,000 considering an initial seed population of . Check the epidemiology section for the details regarding how we went about doing it.


Goals

Our aim is to initiate a two pronged approach to provide a solution to drug development delays. As proof-of-concept we will carry out our work on the Dengue disease.


Firstly, in the essence of iGEM, we will be using synthetic biology to partially replicate the infection state where the virus interacts with the host system to gain entry and invade the tissues. So, even without using cells isolated from patients, we can create an artificial system that will enable us to study the components of our choice reasonably.


For this we are creating a modular reporter system consisting of viral components and host components fused to fluorescent tags and assembled in a mammalian expression system. The interaction will be modulated by use of chemical biology tools. This interdisciplinary approach will provide us with … FRaPPe! A FRET Based Ranker for Proteins and Peptides.


And, to kill two birds with one stone, FRaPPe can eventually turn into a drug screening module to provide a therapeutic intervention strategy for not just Dengue but also several other viral infections. We will use it to test inhibitors designed against specific host-viral interacting components in the Dengue disease. (See schematics for the overall workflow)


Our second approach is to tackle the social aspect of the problem by creating awareness about the disease, the causes and prevention strategies by reaching out to the community at large.





©iGEM IISER Berhampur