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Team:Imperial College London
From 2011.igem.org
| Imperial College London iGEM 2011 | iGEM 2011 European Jamboree Countdown |
| Welcome to the Imperial College London iGEM 2011 website. | |
| Project Description | |
| Arid lands, constituting up to 38% of the globe, are at severe risk of desertification, resulting in the creation of new deserts and expansion of existing ones through both soil deterioration and erosion. Although the soil erosion process occurs naturally due to wind and water impact, it has been dramatically accelerated as a consequence of human activity and the effects are becoming increasingly alarming.
Desertification is particularly significant in the African Sahara, which is expanding south at a rate of up to 48 kilometers per year, affecting 46% of the land on the continent. Human activity in these arid areas is encouraging further wind and water erosion, disrupting already fragile ecosystems as well as agricultural productivity. The growing population of many African countries pressures farmers to cultivate their land throughout the year rather than introduce fallow periods to regain vital soil fertility. This unsustainable cultivation drains nutrients from the soil , leaving the top layer unprotected from erosive forces. Decreased soil productivity can be prevented through sustainable agricultural practice. However, it is difficult to get sufficient plant rooting in eroded soil before the vegetation is washed or blown away. A method of ensuring rooting of protective vegetation in fragile soil would greatly enhance the likelihood of the land being productive in the future. Our project provides a novel solution to prevent erosion of drylands by improving plant root growth to re-vegetate the land more rapidly. Our system comprises of two genetic circuits engineered into an E. coli chassis. The first involves re-wiring of the chemotactic pathway in E. coli to respond to exudates of common crop roots as attractants, localizing our bacteria to the plant roots. E. coli will then be actively taken up by root hair cells (Paungfoo-Lonhienne et al. (2010)). The second circuit involves production and release of auxin, a plant growth hormone, from E. coli into the roots to stimulate their growth and provide a strong root network to hold down top soil. We envisage that such a system will provide a platform for manipulating plants in a multitude of ways other than root growth, such as pesticide resistance. As a team, we recognize the huge human practice issue of releasing engineered microbes into the environment that shadows the potential application of this project outside of the lab. However we have chosen to tackle these issues head on and consider potential solutions when designing our genetic circuits, such as engineering in kill-switches, to encourage the possibility of future development.
The goal of this project is to build a microbial based delivery system that will take advantage of auxin's morphogenic abilities and tackle the issue through the medium of plants. We are looking into the use of roots to stabilize the soil.> |
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