Death Cap Trap

10 July 2025, by MIN-Dekanat

Photo: CSSB

iGEM Hamburg Team at CSSB: Upper row: Joel Martins Ribeiro, Evangelos Masis, Lucy Jansen; Bottom row: Laurenz Stammel, Kristina Boneß, Milo Krömer, Marius Beßler; Not shown: Mariia Vvedenskaia and Ole Hunke

The 2025 iGEM Hamburg team is working on their synthetic biology project DeathCapTrap at CSSB. The Hamburg team will present their project at the end of October during the iGEM Grand Jamboree in Paris. The iGEM Competition is the synthetic biology industry’s largest innovation event hosted by the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Foundation.

Amanita phalloides, commonly known as the death cap, is the most poisonous of all known mushrooms with as little as a half a mushroom capable of killing an adult human. There is currently no antidote for death cap poisoning this is a problem that this year’s iGEM team would like to tackle.  

To develop an antidote for the death cap the team plans to use nanobodies. “Nanobodies are antibody fragments obtained from inoculating llamas with antigens and then extracting the antibodies produced by the llama’s immune system,” explains team member Kristina Boneß.  The iGEM team will, however, not be using llamas to create their antibodies instead, they will create synthetic nanobodies in silico. The team will use an AI a pipeline recently developed by 2024 Nobel Prize winner David Baker.  While Baker’s work focused on designing nanobodies against SARS-CoV-2, the group hopes to use a similar process to develop their death cap antidote.

The team will also be developing a lipid nanoparticle delivery system. “The death cap toxin mainly targets the liver,” notes team member Marius Beßler “therefore the lipid nano particles are ideal for delivery as they should be easily absorbed by the liver cells.”

The nine-member, multidisciplinary iGEM Team Hamburg holds their group meetings and conducts their research at the CSSB under the supervision of CSSB group leader Prof. Michael Kolbe (HZI, UHH) and University of Hamburg professor Mirko Himmel.

“The iGEM competition provides a great opportunity for me to do independent work that I would not typically be able to experience during my studies,” states team member Evangelos Masis “I am looking forward to sharing our DeathCapTrap at the Grand Jamboree in Paris”