Team:ZJU-China/Overview
Description
Background
As a primary production, agriculture is one of the most important human economical activity. The history of farming can be traced back to the thousands of years ago, and its origin played an important role in human civilization birth and development.
Nowadays, the objects and patterns of agriculture production have been greatly changed. Modern commercial farming has gradually replaced the traditional subsistence farming. Apart from the food crops, fiber crops and other cash crops constantly sprung up and took a big proportion in today’s agriculture. In China, cash crops generally present a regional distribution. For instance, teas are cultivated mainly in south and southwestern China, or adjacent to the Yangtse River. These intensive cultivations aim to be easy to mange, concentrate advantages and reduce the cost.
However, such farming pattern exists some drawbacks.A huge local ecological loss will be caused because of the exploration of crop diseases. In order to lower the exploration possibility, many new technologies had been applied in agriculture. Biocontrol is a new method for agriculture control. Compared to general methods like spraying pesticide in traditional agriculture, biocontrol has certain advantages. Firstly, the economic cost reduces since spraying pesticide needs more human and material resources, moreover, just like some enteric microorganism help improve the gut environment of their host,the self-coordination ability of the soil environment itself improves after inoculating bio-agents. Theoretically, appropriate biocontrol methods can achieve sustainable green environmental effect, however, the reality often fails to see this.
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, 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, 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.
See how we build up this system in the Demonstrate page.
