Team:Valencia UPV

The 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 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.

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.

Our whole project is Policy and Practices. We are dealing with a worldwide severe problem of the agriculture based economy. We made contact with the project stateholders. 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.