Overview
During the process of our iGEM project, we encountered some problems. We need to human practice to solve these problems. We interview some expert to get the background of locust plague and existing locust preventionmeasures. Also, we spread some questionnaires to the public. We got some valuable feedback and had a clear picture of people’s attitude toward locust plague. Base on those feedback, we did some public engagement via internet and offline activity, the audience show their enthusiasm and curiosity.
·Communication with Handan Municipal Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs
We interviewed Meixiang Cui, an expert and a grassroot worker on plant pest prevention. She has been engaged in prevent locust plagues for more than 20 years.
Q: What principles we should follow when we try to prevent the locust plague?
A: Sustainable development and environmental protection are the most important one.
Q: What is the criterion of controlling locust plague?
A: The control standard for prevent the locust plague is 0.5 migratory locusts per square meter and 5-10 migratory locusts per square meter.
Q: What food do locusts usually feed on?
A: Locusts mainly feed on gramineous plants, such as wheat, corn, sorghum, rice, millet, reed, barnyard grass and other plants. They also feed on dicots such as soybeans when they are hungry.
Q: what are the current measures of controlling locust plague?
A: The current governance method is mainly to use the power grid and broom to drive them away, or try to plant crops that locusts don't like to eat. The most effective way is using Emamectin Benzoate insecticide and beta-cyfluthrin to kill locusts.
·Communication with Hebei Forestry and Grassland Administration
To get the information about the use of chemical pesticides and biology control, we had a telephone interview with Huanqiang Zhang, a researcher from Hebei forestry and Grassland Administration. He introduced us the advantages and disadvantages of these two measures respectively. The chemical pesticides, such as cypermethrin, have low cost and good effect on locust plague, but they will pollute the environment and make the soil unsuitable for growing crops. The biological control measures have a better specificity on locust and they are eco-friendly. But they are expensive. After listening to our project, he states that our idea of preventing locusts swarming is a completely new to the solve the problem. It would be promising. He also reminded us to ensure the pheromone are safe to the environment and only work on the locust.
·Doing Social Research
To arouse the public awareness to the locust plague, we spread questionnaire on the street, and many people filled up the questionnaire via QR code. They are very interested in our project and had discussions with us.
·Feedback analysis
We got many useful data from those people. Then we did the feedback analysis of 7 questions respectively.
Among the respondents, 37.12% of them were over 40 years old. This group of people had more life experience, but the following results showed that they did not know much about locust and locust infestations. Locust plagues are quite common all over world. There are many areas where locust plagues are frequent. But they don't familiar with. So, this is necessary for us to do the public education.
At the same time, most people don't know much about synthetic biology, a subject has bright future.
Similarly, the public don’t know much about the locust plague, and most people (69.1%) had only heard about it from news. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says desert locusts can pose a threat to the livelihoods of 10% of the world's population. So people haven’t realized seriousness of locust plague.
We also had four questions are about the public's understanding of locust plague, such as the regions with high incidence of locust plagues, impact of locust plague, factors of forming locust plague and attitude toward existing prevention measures.
The respondents were familiar with the measures of locust plague. However, most people do not know much about the locust plague affected areas. People believe that there will be no locust plague in places with high humidity, but only in dry areas such as Inner Mongolia. But that's not the fact. Yunan is one of the examples. The respondents also underestimate the power of locust plague. Only the locust disaster area can experience the devastating power of locust plague.
Integrate human practice
·Communication with Institute of Plant Protection, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences
We went to Institute of Plant Protection, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. In the meeting room, we interviewed Professor Zehua Zhang. He is an expert on pest prevention in the national pasture industry. He has published more than 80 papers. Professor Zhang's research field is the locust monitoring and prevention technology, which fits our research. we consulted him several questions.
Q: Is it feasible to avoid the occurrence of locust plagues by preventing the swarm of locusts?
A: It cannot be completely avoided. The swarm of locusts is actually a phenomenon of locust migration. The destruction of pheromone has a good effect on long-distance areas, which means, it can make the affected area smaller. However, it does not have much significance for locust plagues have small range.
Q: Will the degradation product of the experiment have other effects on the locusts?
A: If locusts are affected, they will exhibit special behaviors. For example, locust swarms isolate changed types of locusts, change their range of activity (flying on the edge of the swarm), outlier, change phototaxis, and decrease fertility.
Q: Is it necessary to study locusts at different stages (3rd, 4th, 5th instar)?
A: Yes. Among these three instars, the 3rd instar is equivalent to the period from human children to youth, and the 5th instar is equivalent to the period from youth to adulthood. These two stages of locusts will have high observation value.
Q: Is aggregation only manifested in adults? Will the larvae swarm?
A: Yes, it is manifested from larvae to adult stage. The scattered or colonized type is restricted by density and has nothing to do with the insect age.
Q: What indicators should we use to judge the success of locust plague prevention?
A: An important governance standard is when reaching 15 heads per square meter or more, emergency treatment is needed. The focus of governance is to prevent migration and proliferation.
Professor Zhang suggested us to use Metarhizium anisopliae. After consideration, we decided not to accept his suggestion. Since many iGEM teams have proposed many designs based on it. But we took the suggestion of breaking pheromones of locust. Our design is degrading guaiacol and serotonin to prevent locust plague.
In the future, we want to improve our project by doing quantitative modeling of the enzyme activity in the culture medium to evaluate the decomposition efficiency and practical value of the program on the target molecule and installing all the core components together. Also, we will to supplement the entire process from production to release.