Team:Tokyo-NoKoGen

Overview

　Pesticides that are harmful to insects, such as cockroaches, put humans and the environment at risk, so safety pesticides are needed. Our project for iGEM 2014 is “Exterminator coli”. We engineered Escherichia coli (E.coli) that produces an inhibitor of a metabolic pathway for insects and exterminates insects such as roaches. In our project, we will produce a pesticide that has no effect on mammals and the environment using E.coli.

　Roaches and many other insects store their energy in the form of trehalose and use the enzyme trehalase to convert trehalose to glucose when needed. However, mammals store their energy in the form of glycogen, which does not require trehalase for conversion to glucose. Therefore trehalase inhibitor can be used as a pesticide which isn’t harmful to mammals but roaches.

　We engineered E.coli that produces the trehalase inhibitor, 3, 3'-diketotrehalose (3, 3'-dkT), a harmless pesticide to the environment and mammals. Our engineered E.coli will overexpress OtsA and OtsB which convert glucose-6-phosphate and UDP-glucose to trehalose, and glucose-3-dehydrogenase (G3DH) which converts trehalose to 3, 3'-dkT. Therefore, we predict that our E.coli can continue to produce 3, 3'-dkT by using glucose in insects. All we need to do is make roaches eat the E.coli we engineered !

Our E.coli products 3,3'-diketotrehlose (red triangle) from glucose(yellow circle).
3,3'-diketotrehalose inhibit the reaction of trehalase, which is one of carbon source in insects.