Johnson Wax, a US based company, has come up with a microbe-based insecticide that, it claims, will be able to put off the most persistent of cockroaches. Two varieties of the microbe, Bacillus thuringiensis, have been identified that can give cockroaches lethal cases of indigestion, Different strains of the microbe produce different proteins, some of which are fatal to the cockroaches. Johnson Wax and a biotechnological farm, Mycogen Inc have devised a way to ferment the microbes in heat tanks and then artificially synthesise the protein crystals inside them.