Project Description
Weeds and pests are most important damages to the crop yield in the world. Traditional ways like using herbicides and pesticides will easily cause resistance and pollution problems. In addressing this challenge we focus on RNA interference (RNAi), a novel molecular technology that used for gene knockdown, which has been showing great potential in agriculture field especially for insects control, Meanwhile we notice that many weeds are the hosts or intermediate hosts of pests. Based on these two observations, we are aimed at using synthetic biology to control weeds and pests at the same time. We selected model organism Arabidopsis as basic plant verification system which has clear genetic background and field pests Aphidoidea are chosen to be discussed as well in our experiment.
