Future —— The Pesticide Star of Tomorrow
1. The developing toxic proteins.
The toxic protein we choose is avermactins, which are a series of macrolide antibiotics with potent anthelmintic and insecticidal activity that are produced by Streptomyces avermitilis and widely used in agricultural, medical, and veterinary fields. Although this kind of insecticide is environmentally friendly and specific to termites, it is still not ideal enough.
Ivermectins are semisynthetic derivatives of avermectins B1, which is one of the eight structurally related avermactins polyketide compounds. Ivermectins have the same effective antiparasitic activity and lower level of toxic side effect than avermectins B1. The worldwide acceptance of ivermectin in livestock production and in the health care of companion animals made it a major commercial success. Its efficacy in human onchocerciasis and human strongyloidiasis also expanded the interest in its use in human medicine. In other words, ivermectin has less toxicity and costs, better environmentally friendliness and wider practicability. However, because of the large size (about 80kb) and operative complexity, it’s hard for us to transform this gene fragment into E.coli. As a result, we can just transform three proper-sized fragments to improve the product of avermectins in Streptomyces avermitilis. While we firmly believe that, in the future we can achieve our goals that transforming ivermectin gene into E.coli and substantially producing ivermectin proteins in host cells.
2. New product type.
The development of nanometer new pesticide formulations with nano materials and technology has become one of the international hot research topics in the agricultural field, which has shown a good application prospect in alleviating pesticides abuse caused by food residues and environmental pollution. The so-called "nano pesticide" is a kind of products of pesticide preparations using nano materials and preparation technology, with effective and efficient technical, carrier and auxiliary agent compatibility.
Nano pesticide can significantly improve pesticide utilization rate, biological activity, and biological effect, reduce the pesticide applying content and number, decrease the loss of pesticide and accelerate the residue degradation. Our project wants to utilize nano materials and technology to improve pesticide efficacy and safety of basic research. We think the innovative combination of nano science and pesticides is the positive exploration and pioneering attempt in reducing the traditional chemical pesticide pollution.
3. Promotional trap system.
Because of the limitation of time and funds, we couldn’t design a perfect tool to achieve all the goals we expected. In the future, we want to improve the trap system and add new elements and functions, making it safer, lighter, more convenient and portable. We want to improve our device’s termite specificity and make sure that there are just termites which can be trapped into our system.
Furthermore, we have design an application to make a real-time tracking online system. The App is not only for customers, by the statistics of the usage of bite and the frequency of the app used, we will get the information about the condition of termites in our surroundings. This is such an important data that it will be share on the internet.
4. Wider application.
Considering the environmental problems, we need to set our device indoors, which means our trapping objects are limited to the termites which dwell in houses. This is a shortage of our TERMITE TERMINATOR, so we want to improve our project with a wider application. We hope to design a new system which can be utilized outdoors. Based on this idea, we need to do more works in our project’s environmental safety and toxin leak preventation.
5. Environmental security.
Any intact project need to be considered the environmental and safety problems, which are related closely to our life and biological system. We have thought about various aspects of safety problems, and got our safety tree. In the future, our goal is increasing the specificity of our system, and achieving quicker and more complete toxins degradation.
6. More trapped injurious insect.
Our project is TERMITE TERMINATOR. Termite is one of the most harmful injurious insects around the world. With the transportation of massive supplies in World War II, these termites’ distribution range has gradually enlarged. At present this kind of termites has caused serious damages in numerous countries and regions, turning into cosmopolitan pest. According to incomplete statistics, all over the world, the annual expenditure of termites control exceeds a billion dollars.
However we need to know that, besides termite, there are more injurious insects damaging and influencing our life. Various kinds of injurious insects, such as locust, mosquito, cockroach and fly, etc also cause some worldwide catastrophes, including grain reduction and human diseases. In the future, we plan to create “The Insecticide Star of Tomorrow”, which is a combination or collaboration of various pesticides and has specificity to other harmful injurious insects. We want to enlarge the range of our objects and help to solve more worldwide pest problems.
7. Practicability and popularity.
We hope in the future our project would acquire stronger practicability and wider popularity. We want to popularize our device and project from rural to urban area, from individual to factory production, and from domestic to international market.
