Hello, we are a team hailing from IISER Berhampur, India and this year marks our first attempt at competing in iGEM! Amidst these extenuating circumstances, our team comprising students from several streams is trying to make a difference, a little at a time.

For our project, we decided to work on the deadly dengue fever which has plagued many countries over the years. Normally, dengue affected people show slight symptoms such as fever and rashes, but at times they develop Dengue Haemorrhagic Fever or Dengue Shock Syndrome, which can be fatal. Alarmingly, we still don’t have any effective vaccines or drugs against dengue, and thus any and all resources to speed up the process of developing a therapeutic would be a real asset.

The dengue virus replicates in the host, by making use of myriad protein-protein interactions between its proteins and those of the host. So we decided to target these interactions in order to find an effective peptide inhibitor, an i-PEP, that can stop these interactions.

However, the most important part of our project will be our NSPIR Reporter System that will involve the processes of FRET(which quantifies the PPI) and CID (to help us modulate the interactions), to validate Protein-Protein interactions and act as an assay for our peptide inhibitor. The NSPIR System will thus provide a high throughput screening system that can screen many different peptide inhibitors at once.

The best thing about this NSPIR system is that it will be a universal system that can be used for observing any protein-protein interaction, not just the ones that we chose for our project! Moreover, it will greatly speed up the drug development process for any inhibitor type drug by telling us, very quickly, how well they work.

For further information, feel free to contact us.

Email: igem@iiserbpr.ac.in

Instagram: @igem.iiserbpr

Twitter: @iGEM_iiserbpr

Facebook: IGEM IISER Berhampur

Also, don’t forget to vote for us!