To save bees from Nosema ceranae infection, the culprit of colony collapse disorder (CCD), NYMU-Taipei iGEM team has created the so-called Bee. coli from Escherichia coli MG1655, which naturally resides in bees.
Backgroud knowledge of Nosema ceranae
Honey bee is a social insect and can be divided into several classes – queens, drones, and workers, which can further be classified into field bee (which is responsible for getting honey from the nature) and house bee (which is responsible for cleaning hives). However, a single bee (especially field bee) may fall ill to CCD when it intakes water or food contaminated by Nosema ceranae spores. What’s worse, CCD may in turn spread to other bees through exchanging substances via mouthparts or feeding food to sacbroods.
After getting into bees’ mid gut, Nosema spores will germinate, elongate its polar filament, and pierce into mid gut epithelial cells to transmit its genetic material. After finishing several life cycles, the infected epithelial cells will burst, leading to the spread of Nosema spores to nearby epithelial cells.
The Bee. coli is designed to work successively as follows:
(1) Bee. coli continuously secretes mannosidase to inhibit the sprouting of N. ceranae spores.
(2) if the bee is infected with N. ceranae, the fungus-killing-circuit with a positive feedback design will be turned on to wipe out N. ceranae.
(3) if these designer weapons should fail to conquer N. ceranae, a bee-suicide-operon will be activated to kill the infected bees but save their companions.
Besides, a light-inducible lysis system is created to ensure our Bee. coil only lives inside of the bee. In addition, we have used encapsulation as the method to send our Bee. coli into the bee. Since the capsule will only dissolve in a bee’s gut, our Bee. coli will not wantonly spread out.
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