Team:Valencia UPV

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Sexy Plant

Sexy Plant is our environmental-friendly choice for pest control. We produced moth sex pheromones in Nicotiana benthamiana and released them into the air to produce mating disruption and avoid moth’s offspring, the larvae which are the real cause of damage. Pheromone production is under the control of a genetic switch to improve the plant’s resources usage. In addition, we designed a biosafety module to easily identify the engineered plant and avoid spread of the genetic material.

Pheromone Production

This is the core of our project. Sexy Plant is a pest control choice based on the production of sexual pheromones, which will confuse male insects and make them unable to find the female.

Modeling Moths Response

When one stares at moths, they apparently move with erratic flight paths. However, male moths follow sex pheromone concentration gradients, moving after female moths.

See how we modeled this complex behavior.

Policy and Practices

Our whole project is P and P. We are dealing with a worldwide severe problem of the agriculture based economy. We made contact with the project stateholder. Bayer CropSciences, Cooperatives and Representatives of the Farmers gave us their opinion and all of them are very interested in the outcome of the project.
See how we and them did get involved.