IISER BERHAMPUR WON GOLD AT WORLD’S LARGEST SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY EVENT
Bureau,Odishabarta
BERHAMPUR:FRaPPe,A FRET Based Ranker for Proteins and Peptides demonstrates a solution to slow drug development pipelines in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This tool will enable the scientific community to accelerate drug development for various infectious diseases and open new vistas of exploratory research into the phenomena of protein-protein interactions (PPIs). In this novel, versatile approach, we have incorporated Synbio principles to assemble modules from chemical biology, fluorescence reporters and our protein targets to craft a solution to the deadly Dengue disease that plagues tropical and subtropical nations. Our system, validated with combined modelling and wet lab experimentation, will enable modulation of the extent of PPIs and their quantification via fluorescence readout, thereby estimating the drug efficiency in attenuating these interactions in vitro.
IISER Berhampur, where a team of young scientists recently won a gold medal for a significant project at the world’s largest synthetic biology innovation event hosted by the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Foundation. Our student team is pushing the boundaries of synthetic biology, an industry that’s changing the way we make things, solving global problems and treating foundational advances by engineering biology. I thought you might be interested in hearing details about our project on a novel, versatile tool entitled FRaPPe, and how it’s impacting our local community and our experiences during this competition in which we participated for the very first time. Our project explored ways to study how proteins interact within cells and how researchers can tweak systems to express proteins of their interest, bring them together and break their interactions. Why does this matter? Because, our disease of interest, Dengue uses a plethora of these clever interactions to cause disease progressions and we went on a quest to study them and design drugs to block these. This is important to our local community because many areas in India and particularly in the neighbourhood of our institute are suffering from the Dengue scourge.
As part of the project we undertook several initiatives to spread awareness including net distribution campaigns and educational resources for primary school students.
The responses in these endeavours was quite overwhelming. Being an up and coming institute, this journal was a memorable experience for all of us and will serve as a boost to the scientific temperament of our local and national community.
