Team:CIDEB-UANL Mexico/Project-Preview

After the workshop given to us, we started with a brainstorm to have ideas from where we could buid a project. We started with some ideas, such as bacteria with the ability to break down DDT; bacteria that detected cancerous cells and killed them; bacteria that produced alliinase in order to catalyze the formation of allicin which is a substance produced by Allium Sativum (garlic) and has pesticide properties[1].

We liked that idea but we found a lot of complications to get the project done, somewhere that allicin is a very volatile substance, so capturing it was very difficult, E. coli but allicin has anti-bacterial properties, and other properties that didn’t result favorable for our project[2]. Due to these problems, we decided to look for another substance but we wanted to work with the same idea of pesticides.
We found some proteins with pesticide properties that were discovered few years ago and that do not harm the environment. One of them is the Vip3 protein which has a lot of derives. Some of them where more problematic for our project idea than others, for this, research had to be continued. A big problem we had to face is that the Vip3 is about 3000 bp and this is a big size for a protein to be inserted in the plasmids we would be working with. Finally, we choose the substance Vip3ca3 and that’s how we got to the actual project but this is only the first part of the whole project idea.

1 Chavarrías, Marta. "Ajo en la lucha contra Campylobacter."Eroski Consumer. Fundación Eroski contigo, 16 May 2012. Web. 23 May 2013. .
2 EB Kuettner et al, The active principle of garlic at atomic resolution, J. Biol. Chem. 277 (2002) 46402-46407