BoNT C - Licence to enter In modern medicine treatment options involve many substances modified from natural sources, occasionally even toxins. We modify botulinum toxin in a way that leads to its detoxification. Thus, it can be coupled with a variety of other substances while not losing its specific shuttle mechanism for neuronal cells. In detail, we develop a library of different detoxified botulinum toxin derivatives which can accommodate other proteins, small molecules, and fluorochromes by specific linkers. To investigate the influence of the point mutations leading to detoxification in the active site, we conduct MD simulations. Since our shuttle mechanism could potentially be used in patients, we remove the most prevalent immune epitopes by a theoretical bioinformatics approach. Ultimately, our system is supposed to be utilized for therapy strategies and specific neuronal targeting in basic research. With our project we want to encourage future teams to think outside the box while keeping safety in mind.

Working neatly is very important to every scientist. Because of this, here we're describing our methods. You can click any of the tabs to see what we did in each laboratory.

Here you can read our Labbook. It is the place, where we described everything that we did, and when. If you are interessted in our workflow, you can read everything below.

Also in this year, our team decided to participate in the fifth international iGEM InterLab study, which aims to identify and correct the sources of systematic variability in synthetic biology measurements. The overall goal is that eventually, measurements taken in different labs will not underly the problems of variability due to different measurement environments or devices anymore, but will be reliable and comparable for all members of the science community.

The main question the InterLab Study 2018 tackeled was:

If you are interested to read more about our InterLab study results: click here.