What is Gastonday-Shangde?
Gastonday-Shangde is a iGEM team based out of 2 schools. Gaston Day School in Gastonia, North Carolina and Shangde Experimental School in Shanghai China. Every week we meet together in a Zoom meeting to catch up on what we have done as well as to plan for the future.
Our Project?
We first looked into developing a therapeutic project specifically for Nonketotic Hyperglycinemia (NKH) because we talked with the parents of an affected family and learned that their daughter, a student at our school, has a sister with this disease. After research, we found that NKH is a global problem. NKH causes seizures, low muscle tone, lethargy, coma, and apnea caused by the accumulation of glycine. Sodium benzoate (SB) helps regulate glycine levels by increasing elimination through the kidneys. However, SB irritates the digestive system. Compounds found in cinnamon are metabolized to SB by the liver leading some families to use cinnamon as an adjunct treatment for NKH. However, the composition of cinnamon bark varies from area to area and between different barks, so there is no accurate dose for the medicine, leaving the potential for improvement.