Our New Basic Parts
We developed 4 new basic parts to contribute to the 2024 iGEM registry this year. Each of them was codon optimized for E. coli.
- This includes an aprotinin coding sequence, which encodes for a serine protease inhibitor. This was performed because the previous team working on a part that also encoded for aprotinin did not properly list all of their modifications on their part page.
- We consider our most important basic part to be added is the destructin-1 coding sequence which creates a serine protease, the main enzyme that P. destructans uses to degrade collagen and keratin to infect bat hosts1. The full sequence for this protein includes a leader peptide for extracellular secretion, and putative inhibitory peptide that is cleaved to form the mature protein.
- In addition coding sequences for destructin-2 & destructin-3 have also been added to the registry. They are very similar to destructin-1 with sharing 90% amino acid identity with destructin-2 and 56% with destructin-3. Although we are not focused on generating these proteases within this cycle of the project we hope to characterize them more the following cycle.
The goal of these parts is to encourage other teams to potentially try other approaches in inhibiting destructin-(1-3) to be used to counter white nose syndrome.
The goal of these parts is to encourage other teams to potentially try other approaches in inhibiting destructin-(1-3) to be used to counter white nose syndrome.