(719a) Engineered Cells That Detect and Kill a Pathogen: a Novel Synthetic Biology-Based Antimicrobial Strategy

Synthetic biology has allowed us to design and construct new biological systems that have the potential to resolve important issues related to healthcare. In particular, considering the stalled development of advanced antibiotics and the emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, we now must strive to exploit synthetic biology approaches for designing a new treatment regimen for infectious diseases. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to engineer microbes to detect and kill a pathogen using synthetic biology principles. Briefly, we designed and constructed a genetic system, which comprises detecting and killing devices, that enables Escherichia coli to sense and kill a pathogenic Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain. We further characterized the detecting and killing devices to understand their functionalities, which subsequently helped us to construct the final system and verify its designed behavior. Finally, we showed that our engineered E. coli detects and kills P. aeruginosa, which offers a novel synthetic biology-based antimicrobial strategy that could readily be expanded to treating other infectious pathogens.