Many insect species feed on and damage crop plants. Some flies for example lay their eggs in ripening fruit which are then decomposed by feeding larvae. This reduces agricultural production and can cause both empty stomachs and economic losses for farmers. The world's climate is changing allowing insects to invade new regions and reproduce faster. A growing human population puts a rising strain on the worlds agricultural systems while at the same time insects are becoming increasingly resistant to pesticide chemicals. These challenges are forcing us to envision novel ways in which we can sustainably control insects. Genetic control of insects is a species-specific form of biological control where the release of modified insects reduces or eliminates the potential of wild insect populations to do harm. For example, the mass-release of sterilized males has been used to reduce the population size of many insect pests for many decades. One genetic control strategy is the use of genetic elements called gene drives. These elements, introduced by a few modified insects into a population, can propagate and affect the genetic makeup of the entire pest population, for example reducing the fertility of females. Another approach is affecting the population's sex ratio and shifting it towards males. Since the number of females is important for the size of an insect pest population and since crop damage occurs solely through the activities of females, such approaches that interfere with female fertility and female development are very promising. In this research project we are developing a novel control strategy that seeks to combine these two approaches for an even more powerful intervention. We will pioneer this technology in a well studied insect pest species Ceratitis capitata, the Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly) capable of damaging many fruit crops and a model insect for a whole range of related pest species. In the medfly true-sex conversion i.e. the transformation of females into fully fertile males is possible and, when effected by a gene drive that also reduces female fertility, is predicted to lead to the rapid elimination of pest populations. We will design and test the molecular building blocks for both gene drive and sex conversion in the medfly and combine them to demonstrate that caged populations of this pest species can be eliminated in the lab.

It is the complex interaction of physical, chemical and biological processes that defines the natural environment which we experience and which affects our daily lives. Earth scientists are interested in understanding the contribution of these diverse processes to the evolution of the global environment throughout Earth's history to the present day. Over the last 60 years geochemists have made use of the chemical properties of the different isotopes of elements like carbon, oxygen sulfur and hydrogen to investigate and understand the biogeochemistry of the atmosphere, ocean and the Earth's immediate subsurface. Isotopes are atoms of the same element but with different atomic masses. Different isotopes of the same element display subtle differences in chemical behaviour which allow them to be used to trace the progress and importance of biogeochemical processes. Thus the isotopic composition of natural materials can tell us about the composition of the chemical reactants from which those materials formed, the environment in which they formed and can often define the processes which formed them. In the last decade advances in analytical geochemistry have made available new techniques to investigate the behaviour of the isotopes of metals like iron and copper in the natural environment. This branch of science has become one of the most rapidly expanding and exciting areas of the Earth Sciences. Geochemists have produced and published analyses of natural materials from geological samples ranging from rocks formed over 3 billion years ago to samples actually being formed in the present day. Many of these analyses come from metal sulfide minerals like pyrite and chalcopyrite. They have recorded patterns in the metal isotope data which may help us to understand the influence of early life and the rise of oxygen in the primitive atmosphere, the processes forming economic mineral deposits and the ways in which bacteria contribute to the chemistry and environmental mobility of metals in sediments. Our problem is that in order to meaningfully interpret these data, we need to understand in detail the fundamental chemical processes that control the geochemical behaviour of metal isotopes in the environment. This project will investigate the behaviour of iron and copper isotopes during chemical reactions with sulphur. Much of the Earth's history and most of its subsurface is characterised by anoxia, i.e. the absence of oxygen. In such environments the chemistry of metals is usually controlled by their reactions with sulfur in the form of sulfide. We will use a laboratory based experimental approach to follow the behaviour of iron and copper isotopes during i) the formation of recently discovered dissolved metal sulfide materials called clusters, ii) the formation geologically important sulfide minerals like pyrite and chalcopyrite and iii) the exchange of iron and isotopes between sulfide minerals and solution. We test the hypothesis that it is the nature of the chemical reaction (the 'mechanism', as chemists refer to it) which controls the isotopic composition of metal sulfide materials. We will use our experimental results to identify whether the iron and copper isotope compositions of natural sulfide materials reflect solely the composition of the materials from which they formed, or whether their composition is also determined by the formation processes itself. The results will be of fundamental importance to isotope geochemists and applicable directly to studies of metal isotopes in a wide variety of natural systems of all geological ages.

The chemistry of coral skeletons records climatic information at the time the coral lived i.e. skeletal Sr/Ca is affected by seawater temperature. The analysis of fossil coral skeletons offers an excellent opportunity to reconstruct past ocean temperatures and therefore to predict past climates. However skeletal Sr/Ca is also affected by biological processes and corals of different growth rates deposit different skeletal Sr/Ca equating to errors in reconstructed seawater temperature of up to ~3 degrees C. In this research we will identify the cause of the Sr/Ca variations between fast and slow growing corals. We have devised a research programme to study how Sr and Ca are transported across the coral tissue to the calcification site. We will culture corals and use biochemical inhibitors to switch off various ion transport mechanisms to determine how skeletal chemistry is affected. We will identify how each mechanism varies between fast and slow growing corals and will develop a methodology to correct for variations in ion transport processes between corals, allowing the accurate reconstruction of SSTs from skeletal Sr/Ca.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Our central aim is to design and investigate the interface between plasmonic nanoantennas and single molecules in order to allow for the simultaneous optical and electrical characterization of the nanosystems. The nanoantennas are used as an efficient channel for electromagnetic radiation from the far field to the nanometric volume occupied by the single molecule, therefore enhancing its interaction with radiation. This enables functional spectroscopy of single molecules without relying on intrinsic molecular resonances. The rational design of the nanoantenna/molecule interface will be applicable to a wide variety of molecular systems via careful design of the underlying plasmonic resonances. We will focus on single-walled carbon nanotubes as a particularly relevant molecular test bed.