Unsusceptible

The problem the iGEM team wants to tackle is that of antibiotic resistance: as a result of overprescribing and a careless use of antibiotics, more and more bacteria have become unsusceptible to these kinds of medicine. “The point is that it may often still take three days to determine which bacterium causes the infection,” Deckers says. In the meantime, doctors often prescribe antibiotics in order to treat to most probable culprits, he explains. “For instance, a bladder infection can be caused by five different bacteria. However, if you know which of these you need to treat within an hour, it becomes much easier to apply a targeted treatment, instead of adopting a shotgun approach.”

The plan is to use so-called phages to detect bacteria, Van Mil says: “A phage is a kind of virus to bacteria – completely harmless to humans. Each phage only infects a certain kind of bacterium and subsequently multiplies at such a rapid pace that it causes the bacterium to bursts open within half an hour. At that moment, we can detect the phage’s DNA and use it to identify the bacterium.” The students want to use a form of bioluminescence whereby molecules emit light the moment they bind to a specific piece of DNA that was predetermined by the team with a computer program specifically written for this purpose. The research group led by professor Maarten Merkx, one of the team’s scientific supervisors, has a great deal of experience with these kinds of detection techniques.

The team has contact with the Queen Astrid Military Hospital in Brussels for the tests with the phages. Because even though they cause no danger to humans, TU/e does not allow researchers to work with phages in its labs. Deckers: “Phages mainly represent a risk to all the other experiments on bacteria that are conducted here.”