Team:BNU-CHINA
Welcome to BNU-CHINA!
Project Description
Title:Sirens
Pests are seriously detrimental to crops. In order to prevent this detriment, diverse kinds of chemical pesticides were used in last decades. However, these pesticides pollute the environment and increase the pest resistance substantially. Such that, it is very important to develop environment-friendly biological pest control methods, which can specifically reduce the pest populations but do not endanger other higher animals.
Our project intend to build a novel engineering bacteria, which will express organics to allure pests and synthesis specific toxalbumin to kill the pests after they devour it. Furthermore, the bacteria will initiate suicide to avoid the damage to environment.
Our project concerns mainly on nematode first, regarding nematode to be the crucial pathogenic organism, which most common types are ''Meloidogyne incognita'', ''Bursaphelencus xylophilus'' and ''Cyst Nematode''.
A series of terpene compounds were identified, including linalool and limonene, to be the chemo-attractants for most insects, as well as play a certain role on attracting soil nematodes. So we pick linalool and limonene as the candidates from the chemo-attractants bait pool. We intend to build new metabolic pathways synthesizing these two terpene compounds in E.coli by providing linalool synthase and limonene synthase, then validate its effects on nematodes.
Two kinds of proteins are toxic for nematodes. Bace16 is the serine proteinase producing by an intracellular obligate parasites in nematodes called Bacillus sp. B16. Bace16 will inhibit the growth of nematodes by hydrolyzing their collagen and corneum. MpL is an agglutinin derived from Macrolepiota procera. Feeding nematodes with E.coli expressing MpL will prevent them attain maturity. In our project we are knocking Bace16 and rMpL in E.coli respectively. After devoured by baited nematodes, the E.coli will activate the toxalbumin expressing system to kill them specifically.
After a sophisticated nematode trap system is built, we will continue and expand the development of the trap systems for other kinds of agricultural pest, aiming at building the bait and the toxalbumin database of various pests.