Team:NCHU Taichung

Global climate change has threatened people’s lives and property safety seriously. In 2021, there was a severe flood in Germany, however, on the contrary, we Taiwanese was suffered from a 3-month long water shortage (from April to June), especially in Taichung.
This situation caused a fallow of many crops, like rice, the major crop in Taiwan and which is also important around the world as well and make a great loss to both farmers and consumers. It's believed that cutting down the greenhouse gases emission is the way to reduce extreme weather events. Thus, we aim to develop synthetic biology assisted circular agriculture to help with this problem.

Rice is a staple food, which feeds half of the world’s population. Consequently, the annual consumption of rice is about 500 million metric tons. [1] Every kilogram of rice is harvested accompanied by 0.7-1.4 kilograms of straws that means a huge amount of agricultural wastes are produced.[2] A lot of Asia countries, included Taiwan, treats these straws by improper way, burning it out, which releases CO2, a main greenhouse gas. Moreover, burning straws leads to polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and particulate matters coming out. Polynuclear aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) causes cancers and particulate matters cause respiratory diseases respectively.

To stop people from burning rice straws, we proposed a new method to deal with rice straws.
We synthesized cellulosomal enzymes with modified Bacillus and produced saccharified straw liquid in this section. This product will be the core material for next valuable product.

The saccharified straw liquid produced in last step is held as medium for modified Bacillus subtilis RM125 to synthesize pyrroloquinoline quinone, which can be a biostimulant.

Through the above processes, wasted straws end up to be a biostimulant and the biostimulant is inoculated to rice. It means that our project convert agricultural wastes to biostimulant. Thus the concept of our project fits in the needs for circular agriculture. With our project, we reduced air pollutants resulted from straw burning , reach zero waste and make the production of rice to be sustainable.

Reference

1. M. shahbandeh. (2021). Rice - statistics & facts.statista.from

2. Dr. S.S. Roy et. al. (2018). Brainstorming Workshop on Rice Residue Burning In Manipur - Issues And Strategies For Sustainable Management.

  • nchutaichung2021@gmail.com
  • NCHU iGEM Team
  • igem_nchu_taichung
  • NCHU_Taichung
  • NCHU, Taichung, Taiwan