Plant Synthetic Biology
Navarra Biogalaxy3 sets its aims this year on Mars on the aRADIAMARS mission, continuing with the work made by our previous mates of Navarra Biogalaxy2. The red planet attracted the attention of the 2019 Navarra Biogalaxy team, leading them to propose different solutions to make plants able to survive Mars' hostile living conditions being, one of them, radiation, our source of inspiration for starting this new space mission.
We believe in the idea of using plants in space, as they could provide environmental, nutritional, and therapeutic applications if they were able to adapt to the new conditions.
Mars' radiation is a big problem and our project could help to get a step closer to succeeding in future space explorations however, this is a long-term process, so we have come up with a way to shorten it. The base of our strategy is synthetic biology.
Withal, we are thinking about Mars, aiming to help the Earth. You may know that the advances made thanks to space exploration have been brought back to Earth and, have been in the long run, beneficial to us. Some of these advances are water purification, which was developed for long-duration missions on the ISS and now can be used in the refugee camps, or the solar panels which are today one of the best ways to sustainably obtain energy on Earth. Both were firstly thought for the space missions. The list is long and has lots of things that are used daily such as the GPS, the inalambric hoover, dehydrated food, firefighter uniforms, or tire improvements.
The last Navarra Biogalaxy team created a biobrick construction containing Arabidopsis PAP1 gen, this year we have been able to characterize it and prove the last team's hypothesis: the gen successfully makes the plant increase its ability to protect itself from radiation. We also have signed it in the iGEM's biobrick registry so other teams can work and use it in future projects. We are glad to cooperate with the scientific community making it universal and more collaborative.
We also wanted to improve this previous work, so we decided to completely produce new plants thanks to synthetic biology, using the Golden Braid method, through which we have created a biobrick containing Arabidopsis PAP1 and Arabidopsis UVR8 genes. Hoping that our plants become even more resistant to UV-B light. We haven't had time to characterize it so, the characterization of these genes could be an inspiration for other teams who want to continue with our work, to prove its effectiveness and share it globally to help in the advance of science.
As we mentioned our project seems to be designed exclusively for Mars, but after all, Earth is our home and we want to help it through our project too. Besides the space exploration application, we realized that a useful application on Earth would be the improvement of agriculture. It's a fact that some regions on Earth are more exposed to UV radiation, leading them to have a decrease in the crop's production effectiveness. Combined with the world population growth, we can not afford a deterioration in food production in the primary sector. Our project gives a solution for this problem, which could be tackled using our plants.
If you want to know more you can go to the section on Sustainable Development Impact.