Team:NCTU Formosa/Test

Insect damage has been a severe problem ever since ancient agricultural times. Nowadays, people are still suffering from harmful insects.

People have been striving to resolve these problems by using pesticides. It seemed to be really effective at first, but after several years, people became conscious of the side effects of those environmentally hazardous chemicals.

This year, our team NCTU Formosa established a taskforce, Harmful Insects Elimination Force, to solve this problem. Compared to the complex biosynthesis pathway of pheromones, we found the simple act of expressing the DNA sequence of PBAN (Pheromone Biosynthesis Activating Neuropeptide) to be equally, if not more, efficient and effective. Just like pheromones, PBAN is species-specific. Once our target species comes in contact with the PBAN produced by our E. coli, its pheromone glands will be stimulated and thus attract more of its own kind into our capturing device.

So far, we have already collected sequences of a few common species of harmful insects. Hopefully this model can be widely used in the future when PBANs of more insects are found.