Team:NCTU Formosa/Test

Pesticide hazards

Because of the hazard of insects, human beings to make a lot of ideas to kill these harmful insects. In 15th century,people used heavy metals to kill harmful insects,such as Arsenic,Mercury and Plumbum, which caused a catastrophe to the environment.

Pesticide becomes more powerful along with the technology, in 20th century,the agriculture develops rapidly just because of the evolution of pesticide. But the pesticide is not only harmful to the insects but also harmful to the human beings. People found this problem after several decades. The toxin of the pesticide will be kept in creatures by the food chain,and finally go into human's body.

However, it's not too late to improve this situation. We can create an evolution of agriculture by a new method,and it is what we do!

Solution to both questions

It needs pesticides to eliminate the pests, but the use of pesticides will hurt environments and cause harm to humans. Thus there have been conflicting issues, and have been difficult to be solved. In order to solve the above-mentioned problems, we came up with a practical, inexpensive way.

Figure 2， This is a diagram of our device, we will mention how this device can bring better results for our plan and how we improve it's efficiency later.

Reference

PBAN(Pheromone Biosynthesis Activating Neuropeptide)

Introduction

PBAN(Pheromone Biosynthesis Activating Neuropeptide) is one kind of peptide that can activate biosynthesis of pheromones of many kinds of insects. Once a PBAN binds with the G-protein coupled receptor on an insect’s pheromone gland, biosynthesis would be activated and pheromones will be synthesized and emitted.

Working mechanism of PBAN

Features of PBAN

1. PBAN is species-specific just like pheromones, that means every kinds of insects which can produce pheromone have it's specific PBAN，which can only bind with it's specific receptor and only stimulate the biosynthesis of a specific pheromone.

2. The coding sequence for a PBAN is usually around 100 basepairs. Thus, it is easy for E.coli to express. We can even combine several different PBAN sequences into one BioBrick assembly. (Check this out at our BioBrick page)

PBAN in nature

In nature, female insects such as moths release PBAN during mating to stimulate the synthesis of pheromones in order to attract their male counterparts. PBAN can also facilitate the release of non-sex pheromones such as trail pheromones for ants.

How are we going to use PBAN?

In our project, we will biologically synthesize PBAN with our E.coli. We store the PBAN inside a trapping device (check this out at our Device page). In the device, there will be appropriate lighting and nutrient sources that will attract insects.

Once an insect is attracted into our device and ingests the nutrient sources we provide, it will also inevitably come in contact with our PBAN, which is evenly mixed with the nutrient sources. As the PBAN works its magic and activates the pheromone synthesis of the attracted insect, more of this species of insect’s counterparts will be attracted and later captured.

Reference

Biobrick Design

Figure.1

Figure.2

We searched the DNA sequences of the PBANs from many kinds of moths on NCBI, then contrasted to the amino sequences from papers so that we can selected the DNA fragments which directly correspond to gland-stimulating function, By ligating the Ribosome binding site(B0034) and PBAN DNA sequence, we were able to make E.coli directly produce these PBANs instead of the original complex process of PBAN biosynthesis in insects. We had gotten nine kinds of PBANs, each of which is from one kind of moth ,after we constructed the PBAN biobricks, the B0034+BFP+J61048 biobrick was ligated behind the PBAN biobrick in order to make modeling each PBAN biobrick respectively more easy in the future and observing the production of PBANs more convenient for us.