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Our Project Description:   Taking a major role in pollination, bees are one of the most important organisms within an ecosystem. However their populations are in serious decline. Colony Collapse Disorder has been found as the most common cause of the disappearance of bees in large numbers. Some pathogens like parasitic fungi and a pesticide called imidacloprid are the leading reasons of CCD. In this study, our aim is to decrease the number of hives affected by chemical compounds such as imidacloprid. Our plan is to turn the mutualistic bacteria living in bees' guts into a shield mechanism to protect the bees against these factors. A protein CYP6G1 found in Drosophilia melanogaster has the ability to degrade imidacloprid into harmless substances. Moreover, coumaric acid increases the general immunity of bees against harmful components and parasitic organisms and we aim to increase the level of coumaric acid in bees' guts. The main objective of this study is the transformation of the genes coding for these two proteins to Bacillus subtilis, which mutualistically live in bees' guts.

As a well-known fact, bees take the major part in pollination, which leads to give fruit, while preparing honey. During the last few decades, some powerful insecticides like imidacloprid were developed to fight with harmful insects; however, the ability to kill almost all insects started to affect other insects, which they must not have affected from the beginning.

This was the start point of our project. We, as a group formed by mostly biological sciences students, knew that no ecological system can maintain without bees. When we looked into the source of the problem, it was clearly revealed that we couldn’t stop usage of imidacloprid. Then, we came up with an idea to protect bees against existing imidacloprid. Having known that drosophila has some sort of immunity to this insecticide, we planned to use it.

To protect the bees against living microorganisms that are dangerous for the bees is our aim. We made a research and we realized that bees recently suffer from insufficient feed. Since beekeepers prefer to feed the bees with high-fructose corn syrup or sucrose because of the low prices, bees started to suffer from insufficient nutrition. Bees lost their ability of fighting against the pathogens, parasites and pesticides and this situation creates a major problem, colony losses. P-coumaric acid is the most important substance as one of these nutritions.

P-coumaric acid, a monomer of sporopollenin, is the essential substance for the bees’ diet.

In this year, in the kill switch part of our project, we use an mRNA interferase, MazF, which cleaves mRNA’s at specific sequences. In our kill switch, we used anti-sense RNA principle as a template. According to this principle, MazF, which is constantly produced via a constitutive promoter, is got inactivated by Anti-MazF construct. In order to trigger this mechanism, we used IPTG, a harmless molecule for the bee which at the same time does not appear in the honey too. When IPTG is present in the environment, LacI is inhibited by IPTG and therefore promoter gets activated. With the activated promoter of it, Anti-MazF is produced and inactive MazF. As long as IPTG exists, MazF gets inactivated continuously; therefore, the bacteria maintain their lives. On the other hand, if bacteria exists in a IPTG-free environment, Anti-MazF producing stops, which leads to MazF producing and bacteria get killed by MazF.

Imidacloprid Immunity

Immune System Boost

Kill Switch

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