Debugging Biology

This is the story of an informatician who was thrown into a world full of biologists, not knowing even the “b” of biology. The revelations, daily struggles, “wow” moments, and also the “what the hell is this?” moments make up this journey.

Who knows what the future holds for him? Will things finally start to make sense, or will he get nominated for the Nobel Prize for Ignorance?

Let us find out what he actually does regularly at work—and figure out a survival strategy.

The battle against pests has been going on since the dawn of humanity. The traditional use of pesticides is effective in controlling pest population, yet this is also detrimental to other environmentally important insects, such as bees. The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) is a pest control approach, which involves the release of sterile male insects to the wild to mate with the females. Since such mating would result in inviable offsprings, it can effectively suppress pest population, while not affecting other insect species. Our research focuses on streamlining the process of SIT by improving the sexing process of the pest species through genetic engineering, making the selection and subsequent sterilisation of the male insects more efficient.