Research

Cyanobacterial delivery of shrimp disease therapeutics

Freshwater cyanobacteria Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942 is gaining popularity in the synthetic biology community due to its genetic tractability, ease of engineering, and minimal nutrient requirements in the form of CO2, water, and light. In addition, shrimp naturally consume microalgae in their aquatic habitats, and thus mitigation of shrimp infection diseases can be achieved by feeding shrimp with cyanobacteria engineered to express therapeutic compounds. To this end, our group is currently developing strains of Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942 for low-cost production and effective delivery of double-stranded RNAs and immunity-boosting proteins to penaeid shrimp

Disease detection with CRISPR-Cas proteins

CRISPR-Cas is a family of endonucleases involved in adaptive immunity of bacteria and archaea. Due to their ability to cleave nucleic acids in a sequence-specific manner, CRISPR-Cas proteins have been harnessed primarily in genome editing organisms. Recently, CRISPR-Cas has also been exploited in detection of nucleic acids from pathogens with single-nucleotide resolution. Our group is interested in applying this system to achieve rapid and sensitive diagnosis of shrimp diseases, with added ability to distinguish between different genotypes of pathogens

Understanding redox regulation of shrimp proteins upon disease infection

Infection is often accompanied by sharp rise in cellular oxidative stress, which can reversibly oxidize cysteine to sulfenic acid. Redox-dependent formation of sulfenic acid can act as a switch that causes certain proteins to undergo functional changes upon oxidative stress and return to the native state once the stress is cleared. Our group aims to achieve a better mechanistic understanding of how shrimp responds to infection at the cellular level by identifying the proteins that possess the aforementioned cysteine redox switch, using sulfenic-acid specific chemical probes