Difference between revisions of "Team:ZJU-China/Overview"

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   <h1 id="description" class="ArticleHead GreenAH">Description</h1>
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       <h2 id="background" class="H2Head">Background</h2>
 
       <h2 id="background" class="H2Head">Background</h2>
 
           <p class="PP">As mentioned above, the cash crops beseem to large-scale intensive cultivation, and because of that, technologies of modern agriculture including automatic irrigation and unscrewed aerial vehicle remote sensing (UAVRS) are always applied in cultivating such crops to increase their productions. However, the current method to apply biocontrol in the farm is not consistent with the concept of modern agriculture, mainly showing at the following aspects.</p>
 
           <p class="PP">As mentioned above, the cash crops beseem to large-scale intensive cultivation, and because of that, technologies of modern agriculture including automatic irrigation and unscrewed aerial vehicle remote sensing (UAVRS) are always applied in cultivating such crops to increase their productions. However, the current method to apply biocontrol in the farm is not consistent with the concept of modern agriculture, mainly showing at the following aspects.</p>

Revision as of 15:28, 1 November 2017

Description

Background

As mentioned above, the cash crops beseem to large-scale intensive cultivation, and because of that, technologies of modern agriculture including automatic irrigation and unscrewed aerial vehicle remote sensing (UAVRS) are always applied in cultivating such crops to increase their productions. However, the current method to apply biocontrol in the farm is not consistent with the concept of modern agriculture, mainly showing at the following aspects.

The key point is the unknowable for applying biocontrol. People can’t know whether and when the diseases intruded, meanwhile, the resistance actions of bio-agents were totally out of control, People can do nothing but get the final result from the production variety of crops. Besides, the effects actually are limited. Taking Paecilomyces lilacinus as an example, it only inhabits some kinds of nematodes by secreting specific protease[1]. And also it’s difficult to composite various bio-agents when preserve their respective advantages at the same time. We think applying biocontrol in such a blind way is very passive.

Fig1: The picture shows the parallel roles played by enteric microorganism and endophytes

Problem

This low effect is directly related to the defects of biocontrol. Microorganisms used in biocontrol(bio-agents) are a lot, including rhizospherebacteria, ectomycorrhiza fungi, and endophytes so on. Application for all of them faces two intractable problems.

The first is the limitation, mainly shows in objects and effects. With the widerly used bio-agents, Trichoderma as an example, its main control objects are Phytophthora and Pythium, but nearly has no effect for the bacteria. Another example is Paecilomyces lilacinus, it only inhibits some nematodes by secreting specific protease. It's difficult to composite various bio-agents meanwhile, preserve their respective advantages. Therefore, the traditional way to improve the biocontrol effects is through large-scale screening for new strains, and the benefit is not high.

The second problem is the unknowable for applying biocontrol. People don't know whether and when the diseases intruded, meanwhile the resistance actions of bio-agents were totally out of control. People can do nothing but get the final result from the production variety of crops. Applying biocontrol in such a blind way is very passive.

Our Aims

ZJU-China 2017 aims to establish a system and the corresponding workflow for applying biocontrol in a more wide and controlled way, and the disease information can also be reported to the human at the same time, which means people can know the situation more accurately and timely. We decided to choose Trichoderma atroviride as the chassis for its widely used in present biocontrol menthods (See our decision-making process in HP Silver page). And we chose tobaccos as our testing plants for its high status in cash crops(See our decision-making process in HP Gold page). Combined with the automation concept pursued by modern agriculture, our design is suitable for large-scale cultivation of crops. And we made a hardware to build a information communication between humans, hardware and bio-agents, which create a new direction in applying biocontrol. We believe it has very broad application prospects in unceasing developmental modern agriculture.

See how we build up this system in the Demonstrate page.

Reference

[1] Brand D, Roussos S, Pandey A, et al. Development of a bionematicide with Paecilomyces lilacinus to control Meloidogyne incognita.[J]. Applied Biochemistry & Biotechnology, 2004, 118(1-3):81-88.