Team:New York City

Welcome to New York City 2018 iGEM Team!

A diverse team of mostly New York City area high school students!

Project Description

Huntington's Disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant disorder that leads to the progressive degeneration of neurons in the brain, which currently has no cure. HD is typically adult-onset and is characterized by a variety of symptoms including amnesia, involuntary movements, poor coordination, and impaired decision-making. Mutations in the huntingtin (HTT) gene causes HD, specifically a trinucleotide repeat of CAG that is abnormally repeated over 40 times. The goal of our project is to test the effectiveness of the plasmid that we generated last year, which targets and blocks endogenous faulty mRNA and releases a corrected RNA strand for proper protein synthesis of the HTT gene. The efficacy of this plasmid will be tested on Huntington cell lines. Since this plasmid has been designed with two different fluorophores to differentiate between the mutated and corrected strands, the effectiveness of this treatment will be tested by evaluating whether the intensity of the corrected fluorophore increases and the mutated fluorophore decreases in the Huntington cell lines.