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, like 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 therefore is a natural molecule.

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 period, in order to reduce doses and minimize the toxicity on bees.

Formate is a simple organic acid that can be produced with E. coli. The initial substrate, glucose, is decomposed into pyruvate during glycolysis, and formate is naturally synthesized by two key genes:

Figure 2: Enzymatic reaction of the formate synthesis

The key genes for formate synthesis were over-expressed. The genetic construction (here) was done by assembling the abovementioned genes, placed under the control of the P(Bla) constitutive promotor (BBa_I14018). RBS (BBa_B0030) were inserted to allow protein expression, and a strong terminator ended up the construction (BBa_B1006).