https://video.igem.org/videos/watch/5afdc180-0c61-4352-8ca8-5709720147c0 Title: Engineering Probiotics to Combat Malnutrition Description: Texas iGEM 2026, Houston’s first community high-school synthetic biology team, presents a dual-track project engineering the probiotic E. coli Nissle 1917 to carry FAAH, an enzyme from Faecalibacterium prausnitzii that degrades the satiety lipid OEA, on the premise that malnourished children and older adults often fail to recover because prolonged starvation switches hunger off. The dry lab reanalyzed a 939-sample public microbiome dataset and found the supplement effect dissolving once samples were grouped by the 118 children they came from, with time explaining roughly ten times more variation than treatment and metabolic modeling showing no difference across 48 metabolites, so the team built a separate OEA model that hands the wet lab a testable target of a few thousand FAAH reactions per cell per second. The wet lab built four FAAH variants at different cellular addresses by IVA cloning and worked through satellite colonies, a frameshift-inducing stray adenine, and a failed ligation before confirming induced expression by anti-His western and depositing the construct as an iGEM part. Human practices then redirected the project itself: experts narrowed the claim to lowering one satiety signal and mandated dead-enzyme controls, clinicians shifted the target population to recovery-phase older adults as a safer on-ramp, and field partners in India and Bangladesh reframed the enzyme as one barrier alongside food access, WASH, and care. The team closes with a named product, OREXA, five gates to clinical translation, and three concrete deliverables: a verified strain, a roadmap with an assay ready to run, and a fully public reanalysis. Wiki | Official Page Thu, 29 Oct 2026 22:25:53 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://video.igem.org https://video.igem.org/client/assets/images/icons/icon-1500x1500.png https://video.igem.org/videos/watch/5afdc180-0c61-4352-8ca8-5709720147c0 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://video.igem.org/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.