Team:NAWI-Graz/Implementations
Team:NAWI-Graz
Implementation
Who are your proposed end users?
Our intention with this project is mainly for people in the agriculture industry to benefit from its uses. By implementing our system in fertilization and other farming activities, private entities or corporations may save a lot of resources, not only benefiting themselves financially but also lending a helping hand in conserving the amount of global phosphate volume.
How do you envision others using your project?
Thanks to the implementation of a sender, which works independent from the receiver and is universally activated by high phosphate concentrations, we hope to bring a positive effect to a wide array of problems regarding phosphate solubilization and inefficient phosphate uptake by plants. By changing the signal from the sender cell it would be not only possible to influence phosphate solubilization capabilities, but it would also allow the user to influence a large assortment of phosphate solubilizing bacteria by modifying the sender cell. The intended goal of the end-user may vary extensively, but every single expression will be induced by phosphate and therefore will be controlled to the user's liking by changing phosphate levels in their intended medium.
How would you implement your project in the real world?
Originally, our vision was to reduce the amount of phosphorus used in the agricultural sector. By adding our modified sender cells into common fertilization solutions and fertilizing fields of crop with said fertilizer, it would be possible to trigger a more efficient phosphate utilization in receiver cells like phosphate-solubilizing bacteria by quorum sensing signalling molecules emitted by the sender cell.
In real world application it would be as easy as choosing to use fertilizer infused with the modified sender cell on your crops. By implementing our project in the real world we would like to think that fertilizing giant acres of crops now only requires a fraction of the phosphorus, which would be used normally.
What are the safety aspects you would need to consider?
We face our biggest challenges in terms of real world implementation with the safety in releasing a genetically modified micro-organism into nature. Our country has strict laws regarding genetically modified organisms and only allows the deliberate release of genetically modified bacteria after extensive research, years of development and multiple government regulated, procedural steps. Genetically modified organisms pose quite a risk by surviving and uncontrollable proliferation into areas not intended for it. Potential horizontal gene transfers of antibiotic resistances and/or other resistances are also very problematic and therefore many governmental regulations are required for safety reasons.
For our system to be successfully integrated into routine usage in agriculture it will require either:
something known as a killswitch, which allows the user to deliberately ensure an autonomous deletion of the cell containing the genetically modified material. This kind of system will be built-in and ensures the containment of the released micro-organism.
an extensive observation of behaviour in a controlled soil microbiome over all possible climate circumstances. They must, of course, contain every community that occurs naturally and the soil must be set up as though natural influences such as rain and erosion take place regularly.