Team:CAU China/Implementation
Overview
When the yeast can produce dsRNA and Metarhizium transferred dsRNA part, our product can turn into biopesticide manufacture and offer to farmers. Farmers can spread the powder to the crop land to inhibit locust population growth by interfering locusts metabolism gene expression.
Manufacture Process
During the manufacture process, yeast was cultivated in fermentation and increase its population rapidly. When the population reaches a certain value, the green light will turn on and yeast will turn into next stage--dsRNA synthesis. After a while, we’ll extract yeast medium and measure the fluorescence strength after HBC added. As the dsRNA concentration meets target value, we’ll take them out of fermentation. Yeast will become yeast powder for us to transport conveniently.
Farmer Process
Finally, we’ll mix Metarhizium and yeast together, turning them into a new environment friendly biopesticide. Farmers spray the biopesticide toward the locust. Locust would eat yeast with dsRNA, gene ATPase, CHS and TSP would be repressed by dsRNA and finally be dead. Or get infected by Metarhizium acridums and the spores spread all around the locust population. Meanwhile, Metarhizium does no harm to human and other species and dsRNA can only repress target gene expression in locust for its sequence identity. The new biopesticide is environment friendly and people can use it safely. Comparing to chemical pesticide which does harm to the environment and biological chain, our Abaddon Remedy biopesticide is quite good. On the pesticide equipment prospect, peasants should prepare well enough to prevent them from harmful chemical pesticide. However, our bio-pesticide is non-/low-toxicity to human beings. On the one hand, locusts would have resistance to the chemical pesticide as peasants using excessively. While, bio-pesticide has a huge advantage on locusts resistance issue for the mixing of Metarhizium and yeast lowering the possibility of producing bio-pesticide resistance.
Our Further work
There are still many problems to conquer in our project Abaddon Remedy. We will do further research on proportion between yeast and Metarhizium and a dissolvent for the mix. In addition, our locust bio-pesticide works slowly comparing to common chemical pesticide. Besides, it is also critical for us to work out optogenetic control system in factory fermentation. In our experiment environment, our fermentation is small enough that the green light can go through the fermentation. Nevertheless, as factory fermentation is so big that is hardly for common light to penetrate the medium. All this issues will become our further research directions.
