IGEM:UW

University of Warsaw IGEM 2008 page

Welcome to University of Warsaw IGEM group page for year 2008

Our Sponsors

DNA Sequencing and Synthyesis

Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw

Foundation for Polish Science

Warsaw University Consultative Council for Students' Scientific Movement

Team Members

• Łukasz Banasiak
• Paweł Krawczyk
• Michał Krzysztoń
• Kamil Lipiński
• Michał Lower
• Marcin Piechocki
• Weronika Prusisz
• Piotr Przanowski
• Ewa Szczęsna
• Bartosz Zapisek

Project Supervisor

• prof. Jacek Bielecki
• dr. Radoslaw Stachowiak

Our Project

Monoclonal Antibodies

Monoclonal antibodies are proteins produced by cells of the immune system for defense against pathogens. Because of high target recognition specificity antibodies are object of research in many laboratories and pharmaceutical companies around the world. Currently exist numerous therapies based on monoclonal antibodies for diseases such as cancer, allergy, viral infections and autoimmunological diseases. Antibodies are also important research tool used to identify various chemical and biological particles.

Unfortunately traditional methods of making antibodies are complicated, expensive, time and work consuming because they are based on immunization of mammals. It is worth to mention that there is constant trend to reduce usage of laboratory animals in scientific experiments, mainly for ethical reasons. Because of that there is constant effort to develop various techniques allowing antibody production in yeast or bacterial cells. In this case only small fragments of antibody are used. Those fragments retain ability of binding to target antigen in the same manner as full antibody does. Currently existing methods are still very time consuming and require large amount of laboratory work to develop single antibody.

Technique proposed by our team will allow easy development and production of monoclonal antibodies in bacterial cells.

Antibody producing GEM

Our research project is divided in three basic stages:

• In stage 1 we will introduce mechanism of targeted increase of genetical variability in regions of bacterial genome encoding antibodies. In this situation every bacterial cell in population will express different antibody on its surface.
• Goal of stage 2 is to provide selection mechanism, which will cause survival of the cells only when expressed antibody binds with target protein. Selection mechanism is based on antibiotic resistance induced by binding of target protein to antibody on cell surface.
• In stage 3 cellular metabolism will be switched to efficient antibody production and export.
  Antibody will be then purified from culture medium. At all stages we have planed various control experiments, which will allow us to determine our progress.

This is very simplified description of our ‘biological machine’. Success of our project would allow simple, fast and cheap production of antibodies with desired specificity.