Abstract

Sustainability is the capacity to endure. It is how biological systems retain its diversity and productivity, whereas various food chains build up specious sustainability. Our ultimate goal is to eradicate pests and minimize human disturbance of the ecological equilibrium by engineering the venom of one of the most notorious predators on earth, spiders.

Through extensive research, we obtained the desired venom proteins. In our project, we called it PANTIDE. Unlike most commercialized pesticides, which are reported to be involved in the demise of bees, PANTIDE targets directly and specifically to the species from the orders, including Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Diptera and Dictyoptera.

Preliminary Project Brainstorming & Accomplished Work

We had several ideas on the table such as metal recycling coupled with electricity generation, optimizing heterologous protein production, bio battery, conductive bio- cable, and bio-color printer. Through idea discussing and credible papers searching, biological pesticides prevailed as our project since we have foreseen the urgent need of it and how immense the use of chemical pesticide involves.

So far, for human practice, we have visited the green markets and Taiwan Agriculture Research Institute Council of Agriculture several times for improving the experimental design and get the knowledge of the general agricultural situation in Taiwan. Aside from farmers and researchers, we also intend to grasp general cognizance of the issues chemical pesticide brought about; consequently, we have done some internet survey for public in NCTU_FORMOSA Facebook page. Last but not least, we create a mind-boggling table game that promotes the concept of synthetic biology and propagates the ideology of our project.

Ongoing Progression

Except for the addition of a special protein that enhances PANTIDE’s orally-active toxicity, we will establish a small-scale experimental farm to simulate the real condition in nature for attracting pests, and we will raise the pests in the preparation of performing the experiment. Additionally, we utilize mathematical methods to set the modeling for the degradation of PANTIDE and differentiate the intrinsic factors and extrinsic factors that affect the toxicity of PANTIDE. For future human practice, we plan to pay field visits to several organic vegetable farmers and tea growers to further investigate the condition of farmland and ecology. In the ongoing progression, we strive to integrate technology into agriculture and create a novel system that cleverly tackle with the long-lasting problem that creepily devastates the sustainability of the environment and human health.

Wiki template information

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