Team:KU Leuven/Project

Our goal is to reduce the damage aphids invoke on our agricultural industry on a sustainable way. The current solution is almost always using huge amounts of insecticides, which damages the ecosystem in several ways. First of all, the indiscriminatory weakening of insects means the useful insects for agriculture are also affected. Besides that the pesticides accumulate in higher organisms that eat the insects.
We want to achieve this sustainable way by using the aphid’s own alarm pheromone (β-farnesene) to scare them off. On top of that we want to attract aphid predators such as the ladybug by using methyl salicylate. This way we make sure the aphids are thoroughly removed.
We have established what might be possible hurdles in introducing this system in the agricultural industry. First we have to make sure the strain on the cell’s metabolism is limited. Beside that we have to take into account that aphids might habituate to constitutive expression of β-farnesene. In third place we do not want to attract the predating insects when they are not needed. Finally methyl salicylate has an effect on a lot of – not always welcomed – insects.
To reduce the burden on the cell’s metabolism and attract predators only when needed we can produce methyl salicylate in response to an external signal that indicates the presence of aphids. By using methyl salicylate we minimise the problems of habituation, as aphids loose their warning mechanism when being habituated to β-farnesene. An other way to avoid habituation of the aphids is to choose for an oscillating production of β-farnesene, which requires a colony-wide synchronized oscillating system.