Difference between revisions of "Team:Toulouse/Description/Eradicate"

After having attracted and trapped varroa in a confined device at the beehive entrance, it is necessary to prevent it from escaping, and to eradicate it. It should be pointed out that beekeepers already use some treatments to fight against varroa, among them oxalate, fluvalinate, thymol or formate. All these known treatments use high doses which are toxic for bees and humans. On the other hand, varroa is developing resistance against these treatments, making them ineffective [1]. In the list of the molecules mentioned above, formate has already prove its acaricide property [2], and has the advantage to be naturally synthesized by E.coli. For this part, the project main goal is to synthesize formate at low concentration. The bacteria will produce formate during a short time period, in order to reduce doses and minimize the toxicity on bees.

Formate is a simple organic acid produced with an E.coli strain. The initial substrate, glucose, is decomposed into pyruvate during glycolysis, and formate is naturally synthesized thanks to two key genes:

Figure 3: Enzymatic reaction of the formate synthesis

The formate being naturally produced in E.coli, the key genes for synthesis are over-expressed. The genetic construction (here) is realized by assembling of these genes, which are placed under the control of P(Bla) constitutive promotor (BBa_I14018). Between genes there are ribosome binding sites (RBS)(BBa_B0030) to improve protein expression, and a strong terminator (BBa_B1006). We finally cloned this two genes and their RBS into a pSB1C3 vector (here).