Sweet Potato Weevil, Cylas formicarius

My Honours Degree (Biotechnology) project is related to sweet potato weevil, major pest of sweet potato. The title of my project is Morphological and molecular characterization of sweet potato weevil, Cylas formicarius and characterization of Chitin Synthase 1 (CHS1) gene. Sweet potato weevil infestation can cause the loss of sweet potato yield about 60-100% and it is more serious during dry season. Sweet potato farms are located in rural areas as source of income and sweet potato infestation affects all the sweet potato farmers. Therefore, this issue must be tackled in order maintain the supply of sweet potato to market as well as income of farmers. There are three parts of my project: morphology (the study of appearance and body parts), phylogenetic analysis (the study of relationship between sweet potato weevils in worldwide) and characterization of CHS1 gene (the study of CHS1 gene for pest control). My main findings are the sweet potato weevils in Malaysia are probably imported from Indonesia or Thailand based on phylogenetic analysis and CHS1 gene has great potential for weevil management strategy development due to its characteristics. 

My project was new and rare as I was the only one who did this in Malaysia so far. I have suffered a lot from experiment failure and frustration during this one year as I need to plan and carry out every experiment on my own. Brainstorming to finding solutions for problems related to experiments everyday was tiring. However, mastering the skills of operating machines and performing experiments was quite fun and it was a great experience for me. I have spent a lot of time and efforts on this project and hopefully my findings would be helpful for future works. 

Here are some of my collections.

My lab

White bands indicating DNA