Mosquitos are such small things, and yet, they can cause much harm and damage. They often carry potent diseases, and transfer them to humans when they bite. Roughly 390 million people are affected by Dengue each year, with hundreds of thousands more being affected by Zika[7]. Our project targets the viral NS5 polymerase (the enzyme that causes viral RNA to be replicated) of these viruses, attacking the source of the problem rather than treating. Our design originally started out by infusing Wolbachia pipientis with a custom-designed RNAi strand. However, due to the unavailability of W. pipientis, we created a proof-of-concept, using yeast as a medium to prove the likelihood of W. pipientis being a suitable host to our plasmid. Using Clustal, we matched up three genomes coding for NS5 polymerase from Zika, Dengue, and Yellow Fever to identify a set of common strands to target, and converted those to complementary RNA antisense strands. With ViennaRNA, we modeled the folding of each strand into a complex structure to find the most optimal to insert into our plasmid, which in turn will be propagated through Escherichia coli and transferred into yeast. Following this transfer, the yeast cell will express our RNA antisense strand and bind with the viral NS5 polymerase mRNA. Finally, the Dicer-2 protein cleaves our combined strand and prevents translation of NS5 mRNA.

Degradation of Viral NS5 Polymerase from Mosquito-borne Diseases with Engineered RNAi
School
Lambert High School
Suwanee, GA
BioBuilderClub Season
2025-2026 Season
Category
Resources