Team:ZJU-China/beifen
This is ZJU-iGEM 2015!
Project description:
Project description:
Project description
Termites are widely recognized as the 5th pest around the world, based on its astonishing number and incredible damage towards wood. Given that a termite weighed 1 gram, then everyone should own 500 thousand termites! Owing to their wood-eating habits, termites are terminators of crops, trees, buildings, river dams；and more oftenly, spoil people’s life.
The traditional way of killing termites is to release imidaclorprid or mirex directly to the environment, which may contribute to hidden troubles to the ecosystem. ZJU iGEMers coated adapted soil bacterium Streptomyces, which secreted Avermectin to kill termites. Avermectin is a kind of antibiotics which do little harm to human beings and other mammals, but it is a strong inhibitor to termites. A slight trace of Avermectin can be effective of killing termites. We develop 3 to 4 functional gene circuits to enhance the production of Avermectin. In order to eliminate the termites, we choose two kinds of toxins which are safe and environmentally friendly. Separately over expressed in E.coli and another host, these toxins were then delivered to the termites by the cell carrier.
In order to attract termites and to deliver Avermectin successfully only into intestine, they assembled cellulose nanocrystals as capsule shells. What is terrific is that termites love cellulose and workers will regard the cellulose as food and bring them to the queen and larvae in a non-defensive way. In this way, we could root out the whole nest gradually.
Then we change the system into a safe and workable device to imitate the real use procedure in our lab. To make sure the safety and security , we also come up with several ways to control the ecological hazard to the minimal range.