 It's been said that there are two types of houses, houses that have termites and those that are going to get termites. Termites cause $5 billion of damage to homes in the US each year with an average repair cost of $3,500. One Purdue professor has been studying the biology of this insect in order to find new ways to control them. Termite is actually a type of cockroach. They're in the same order. Recent science has shown that they're very directly evolutionarily related. They're unique because they're social insects, which means they live in groups or colonies. Like one termite can't live all by itself. It needs to have a whole colony around it. In the world there are thousands of termite species, but in our little part of the US there's really only one species, and it's called the Eastern Subterranean termite, and we care about them because they eat people's houses. You can see the paths that they've made in the wood. They exclusively eat wood. Wood is composed of 60% sugar, and so termites chew up the wood into little pieces of sawdust, and those go in their gut. They have symbionts in their gut, basically little tiny microbes that help them digest cellulose, which is a material that most animals can't digest. And enzymes produced by the termite, as well as all those microbes, take that wood and turn it into sugar, which is metabolic energy for the termite to live. I got started in termite research because it was a unique opportunity about 20 years ago to start applying high throughput gene sequencing technology to understand what's going on in this really complex social insect. We've studied aspects of termite digestion, how they form different forms or casts within the colony, and also symbiosis. One of the amazing things about termites is that the workers are actually immature. Juvenile individuals, like imagine like a teenager or a small child. And then when certain factors are lifted from suppressing that development, then those workers can become supplementary reproductives. They can become soldiers as well. They have this totepotent ability to become different things. So we collect large groups of workers from around campus that we work with. We hold them in a box, and then they become their own functioning colony all by themselves. Working in termites is a really excellent system for students where they can learn how to do science, learn some really intricate biology, and work all the way from the organismal level down to the molecular level. Oh, termites are the best. They're way better to work with than cockroaches, honestly. You have to essentially extract the gut from the termite, and then you have to hope that those bacterial symbiotes, if you wanted to potentially study the microbial ecology, you have to hope those symbiotes don't die as soon as the gut is extracted, which makes the research particularly tedious. We found a whole plethora of different bacteria and it's a whole ecosystem inside that termite gut. There's so many different species, and there's still so much to learn. We've made a couple really big breakthroughs over the years that have led to important papers. The first one was we found a gene which is expressed as a protein in their body, and it is, in worker termites, it's over one-third of the total protein in their body, if you can imagine that. And it's a protein that regulates their development. So this protein is expressed at high levels. It's called a hexamerin protein, and it keeps the worker from becoming anything else. And we discovered that you can silence the gene for that protein, and thus make the protein disappear, and then the workers are more free to become other casts, like soldiers. Soldiers cannot feed themselves, so if you can make the colony become even 20 percent soldiers, that's really costly to the colony. That could lead to its demise. One other really rewarding piece of science we did, using the same kind of high throughput sequencing technology, looking for digestive enzymes in the gut of the termite. So we pulled out 2,000 guts from termites, which took a couple months. We pooled all those, and we're able to sequence the expressed genes from that pool of guts, and we were able to find genes that coated for a new kind of enzyme that would degrade lignin, which is the non-sugar part of wood, but it's the most resistant part of the wood to digestion. That led to some biotechnology inventions that are now being pursued in the industry. We have really good termite sites in the market today, but we have no idea what their market life is going to be, and if someday we might learn something about those insecticides that makes us want to cancel them, because they may not be as safe as we thought they were. So, understanding these fine biological processes like symbiosis and cast differentiation can lead to the development of new types of termite sites, new ways to control termites, and even if we don't discover the great next new insecticide itself, we can still learn things about the biology that help us to control termites better. Dr. Scharf offered a couple tips to prevent termites from invading your home. First, keep the wood on your house dry. Fix any water leaks and make sure your gutters and downspouts are moving rainwater away from your home. Second, keep scrap wood and firewood away from your foundation. Any wood is the perfect food source to attract termites to your house. That'll wrap up this edition of Boiler Bites. Remember that you can watch all of our past stories at BoilerBites.com. See you next time.