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

After being attracted, varroas will have to be eliminated. Beekeepers already use some treatments to fight against varroa, among them oxalate, fluvalinate, thymol or formate. All these treatments use high doses which are toxic for bees and humans. Beside, varroa is developing resistance against some of these treatments, making them ineffective [1].

In the list of the molecules mentioned above, formate has already prove its acaricide property [2], and to our knowledge, no resistance has been reported yet. Formate also presents the advantage to be naturally synthesized by E.coli.

Here, the project main goal will be to synthesize formate at the lowest concentration allowing an efficient elimination of varroa in the trap. The bacteria will produce formate during a defined periods, 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 were over-expressed. The genetic construction (here) was done by assembling of these genes, which were placed under the control of the P(Bla) constitutive promotor (BBa_I14018). Before the coding sequences, ribosome binding sites (RBS)(BBa_B0030) were inserted to improve protein expression, and a strong terminator ended up the construction (BBa_B1006). We finally cloned this two genes and their RBS into a pSB1C3 vector (here).