Team:GZHS-United/Description
Discription
Abstract
This year, our project is to make a new biological mosquito killer to kill mosquitoes in an environmentally friendly way. Mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue and Zika are prevailing around the world and causing death of a great number of people every year. Therefore, controlling mosquitoes is of great importance.
There are two active components in our product: protein Cry11Aa and recombinant Aedes aegypti densoviruses. Protein Cry11Aa is solubilized in mosquito mid-gut and can lead to cell lysis when binding the receptor on cell membrane. The recombinant Aedes aegypti densoviruses can express insect-specific toxin, which kill mosquito by to affect insect neuronal sodium conductance. We mix them together to make effective and environmental mosquito killer. The new mosquito killer shows a high specificity for mosquitoes as a host. It is relatively stable in the environment and have the potential to spread and persist in mosquito populations.
Background
Why mosquitoes?
Mosquitoes are small, midge-like flies that constitute the family Culicidae. In addition to biting nuisance, they are transmitter of several epidemic diseases such as malaria, lymphatic filariasis, Zika etc. In recent year, Dengue fever is prevailing all around the world, especially in Asia and South America.
Dengue fever is an acute, widespread disease transmitted by Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, two mosquito species that are listed among the world's worst invasive alien species. According to World Health Organization, nine tropical and subtropical countries have already confirmed over 10,000 cases of dengue fever by June 14th , 2018.
Data Health and Family Planning Commission of the People’s Republic of Guangdong Province shows that compared with the same period in last year, the accumulated number of cases of dengue fever in 2018 increases by 38%.
How do we come up with this project?
Guangzhou, China, where our team come from, is a severely afflicted area. As the capital of Guangdong province, Guangzhou is troubled by dengue fever because of its weather and social environment. Abundant plants, plentiful rain and warm weather in Guangzhou attract a mass of Aedes albopictus. Furthermore, due to Guangzhou’s great importance in transportation and economy, it has a intensive population(20,150,000) and large flows of people and this creates perfect chance for the disease to spread.
According to our survey, organizations in Guangzhou mainly adopt two ways to prevent and control mosquitoes and related diseases: cleaning possible breeding places of mosquitoes and spraying insecticide regularly. However, these methods are unsatisfactory. Cleaning possible breeding place is time-consuming and ineffective; moreover, it has to be done frequently in order to make sure there is no mosquito breeding. At the same time, insecticides would probably induce insects resistance and most of them are, to some extent, harmful to the environment. Therefore, we came up with the idea of inventing a new, effective, environmental friendly method to prevent mosquitoes.
