Team:McMaster


Wetlab

The increasing prevalence of multidrug-resistant and hypervirulent bacterial strains represents a growing global healthcare concern. However, early detection of pathogenic microbes allow for timely care of patients and the prevention of infectious strains proliferation. In the face of the current challenges in profiling bacterial infections.


Human Practices

The Human Practices team will investigate the current process of detecting antibiotic resistant bacteria to better understand the context for which the Wet Lab is developing the product. We will examine direct and indirect costs, accessibility, time constraints, safety and ethics of the current processes. From the information collected, we will discuss the need and the potential impact of developing products that will detect bacteria more cheaply and quickly.


Dry Lab

The Dry Lab will be supporting the Wet Lab as they use SELEX to find a DNAzyme for a highly pathogenic strain of C. Difficile. During the SELEX process, the Dry Lab will analyze deep sequencing data, monitoring sequence diversity as selection progresses to find possible homologies or motifs that are enriched through selection, using a clustering algorithm.


Community Outreach

The iGEM community outreach team is focused on spreading the interesting work being done in the world of synthetic biology, and more specifically by our research team, across the Hamilton community. We put an extra emphasis on trying to educate and empower students who may be interested in exploring our area of research as a means of achieving two central goals.