Difference between revisions of "Team:British Columbia"

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  According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, bees pollinate 80% of our flowering crops, which constitute one third of everything we eat. From an economic standpoint, a study done at Cornell University estimates that honeybees pollinate $14 billion worth of seeds and crops per year in the United States alone. Unfortunately, global bee populations have been under attack since the early 1990s; in 2015, US beekeepers reported that 42% of their colonies died within the past year.

  Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) refers to a phenomenon in which adult working bees disappear from the colony, leaving behind the queen bee and resulting in its eventual collapse. CCD remains a major concern across North America and Europe. Though the mechanisms by which CCD occurs are still unknown, neonicotinoids (a widely-used class of pesticides) and Nosema apis (an endoparasite that grows in the midgut of the honeybee following infection) have been implicated.

  UBC’s 2015 iGEM team aims to create a strain of engineered honeybee intestinal bacterium capable of degrading the neonicotinoid pesticide imidacloprid, alongside an antifungal agent to eliminate Nosema apis. In doing so, we plan to render inoculated honeybees resistant to both Nosema and to common field doses of imidacloprid, allowing its sustained use while reducing the risk of CCD.

  Gilliamella apicola is a bacterium that natively resides in the midgut of the bee. We believe that by engineering Gilliamella to metabolize imidacloprid into harmless organic compounds as well as to produce gastrodianin, a potent antifungal agent, we can create a strain of Gilliamella capable of conferring resistance to imidacloprid and Nosema, significantly reducing the risk of CCD once stably introduced into the bee gut.

  Imidacloprid is known to be naturally degraded in the environment to 6-chloronicotinic acid (6-CNA). Though 6-CNA displays a significantly lower lethal dosage than imidacloprid, it remains bioactive to a small degree. As such, we plan to investigate downstream enzymes that further degrade 6-CNA, and use this novel pathway in Gilliamella to degrade imidacloprid to a completely non-toxic product in the bee gut.

UBC iGEM 2015