Part:BBa_K1850010

pRha - fimH 136 KO - RPMrel - SpyTag_225 - HisTag_225

This part contains the fimH adhesin under control of a titratable rhamnose promoter. The FimH protein is a subunit of a naturally occurring structure in some strains of E. coli called type 1 pili. These hairlike appendages typically manifest as organelles on the surface of pathogenic E. coli which are responsible for urinary tract infections in humans. The FimH adhesin is found at the tip of the pilus, and binds naturally to the sugar mannose. This part can be cotransformed with BBa_K1850013, which contains the rest of the fim operon, and induced to produce type 1 pili.

We wanted to take the E. coli that naturally colonize the gut and engineer them to specifically bind to cancer cells. We were able to locate a 1 amino acid substitution at site 136 on fimH that had been shown disrupt mannose binding via standard assays. We introduced these modifications separately to our fimH-HisTag plasmid (No part name specified with partinfo tag.