Team:SMS Shenzhen/HP/Gold Integrated
Practice 7: A discussion with Professors in China Academy of Science
In May 2017, when our team was researching the safety topics of our pesticide mate, we contacted with two senior Botanical experts in Kunming Institute of Botany, China Academy of Science. Scientists showed great interest in our project, and they share their ideas and knowledge on these topics with us.
The main topics of our discussion were, whether there are ingredients on the surface of plants that could be potentially damaged by our product and whether traditional chemical pesticides have that serious effect on plants as stated in some reports.
↑One of the letters sent by Yunchang, to Jianchu Xu, one of the botanists in Kunming Institute of Botany.
Questions inside the letter:
Q1: What is the difference of the wax-chitin-protein layers between plants and scale insect?
Q2: What are the common problems brought by the traditional pesticides to the plants?
Q3: (We realized later that there is a problem within our question) Can SacB promoter induces the SRRz lysis system when sucrose exists specifically?
We sent this email to the other scientists as well and received two replies from them.
↑One of the letter from Gui Heng, PhD
Thanks to their (Jianchu Xu, Ph.D.; Gui Heng, Ph.D.) kind replies!
From their letters, we know that:
1.Plants sometimes secret chitinase as an immune mechanism, thus theoretically there is no chitin on the surface of plants.
2.Plants may be harmed when the concentration of pesticides is high or when specific pesticides lead to allergy.
3.Plants keep sucrose as their energy storage material, thus would not release it and induce our bacteria to release enzyme. Our ‘sucrose-induced’ system is safe on the surface of plants and would work on scale insect.
Via frequent correspondence, we set up a long-term communication with scientists within this field. Thanks for their patience and interest!
