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From 2013.igem.org

Wetlab Modeling
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 acquire this by using the aphid’s own alarm pheromones (β-farnesene) to scare them off. On top of that we want to attract aphid predators (by using methyl salicylate) in order to make sure the aphids are thoroughly removed. We have established what might be possible hurdles in introducing this system in the agricultural industry. Firstly we have to make sure the strain on the cell’s metabolism is limited. Secondly we have to take into account that aphids habituate to constitutive expression of β-farnese quite rapidly . Thirdly we do not want to attract the predating insects when they are not needed, since we want to make it as advantageous for them as possible. Fourthly 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. When we produce methyl salicylate the possible habituation of aphids to the β-farnese does not become a serious problem because they can no longer use it to warn eachother for the presence of predators and thus they become more vulnerable to them.

To avoid habituation of the aphids we can choose an oscillating production of β-farnese, which requires a colony-wide synchronized oscillating system.