Team:Tokyo-NoKoGen

Overview

Pesticide to harmful insects, such as roaches, puts human and environment at risk, so more safety pesticide is needed. Our project for iGEM 2014 is “Exterminator coli”. We engineered E.coli that produces an inhibitor of metabolic pathway for insects and exterminates insects such as roaches. In our project, we can produce pesticide that has no effect for mammals and environment by just one kind of E.coli.

Roaches and many other insects store their energy in the form of trehalose and use the enzyme, “trehalase” which converts trehalose to glucose when needed. While, mammals store their energy in the form of glycogen, so trehalase is not used for conversion it to glucose. Therefore trehalase inhibitor is used as pesticide which isn’t harmful to mammals but roaches.

We engineered E.coli that produces trehalase inhibitor, 3, 3´-diketotorehalose (3, 3´-dkT), as harmless pesticide to environment and mammals. Our engineered E. coli will overexpress otsA and otsB which produce enzymes convert glucose-6-phosphate and UDP-glucose to trehalose, and glucose-3-dehydrogenase (G3DH) which converts trehalose to 3, 3’-dkT. Therefore our E.coli can continue to produce 3, 3’-dkT by using glucose in insects. Just what we do is that make roaches eat 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.