New College student joins Oxford team using synthetic biology to tackle global bee crisis

Biomedical sciences student, Anna Karakolevova, has been selected to join Oxford University's team for iGEM, the world's largest synthetic biology competition, where she will help develop a treatment aimed at saving honeybee colonies from a parasite driving their collapse worldwide.

iGEM brings together more than 400 student teams from across the globe each year, all racing to build projects that apply synthetic biology to real-world problems.

Oxford's entry this year is NECTAR, a project developing a dsRNA-based therapeutic to combat Varroa destructor, the parasitic mite widely regarded as the single greatest threat to honeybee colonies across Europe and North America.

"Varroa destructor is an invasive alien species commonly being cited as the single highest risk to honeybee colonies in Europe and North America." Anna explains. "Since the spread of Varroa to Europe in the 1970s, a 200% increase in the rate of bee colony collapse has been noted. Colony Collapse Disorder is a phenomenon where all worker bees either die or leave the hive, abandoning a struggling queen and brood, thereby having detrimental impacts on bee health, crop pollination and food supply and the economic outlook of beekeepers and farmers."

Anna and the team are looking to combat this global risk by developing a RNAi based biopesticide against the Varroa destructor. The project spans three strands of work: "We are engineering a dsRNA molecule targeting a specific Varroa mite gene to help address colony collapse disorder and other bee diseases. We work in the DCHB, currently synthesizing our therapeutic and eventually expressing it in yeast. We validate the stability and efficacy of our therapeutic at the John Krebs field station, working with their bee hives. Lastly, we are building a strong knowledge base about what stakeholders need, and how to make our project sustainable, accessible and safe within our human practices."

Looking ahead, Anna's hopes for NECTAR extend well beyond the competition itself: 

"I hope that we will manage to create our therapeutic and bring NECTAR to those who need it the most. I hope to help beekeepers whose hives are collapsing, and overall use NECTAR to make agriculture more resilient and capable of sustaining humanity in the years to come."

Keep track of NECTAR's progress in the iGEM by following @Oxford_igem on Instagram.