Team:UZurich/Simple Description
Simple Description
Are you ready for iGEM? In November 2020, 12 students from the University of Zurich were brought together by their fascination for synthetic biology.
For this year’s iGEM challenge, we wanted to tackle a problem that is relevant both in Switzerland as well as the whole world.
Inspired by a popular initiative we voted on in June 2021, we realized the gravity of the problems caused by synthetic pesticide use. The initiative aimed to ban the use of synthetic pesticides in Swiss agriculture.
In order to protect our crops from pathogens, we rely on synthetic pesticides. They kill the pathogens threatening our harvests, but they bring many problems with them, like losses in biodiversity and the development of resistance in pathogens.
Our synthetic pesticide use is not sustainable. Pathogens can adapt quickly and therefore force us to remain vigilant.
We often forget that plants have a complex immune system too, just like us humans. But actually, this makes sense: When it comes to the “Fight or Flight” response, their only option is to fight. Over millions of years of evolution, plants have developed diverse strategies to defend themselves. So we asked ourselves: Why don’t we focus on the plant’s immune response instead of killing pathogens?
So we thought: Oh my God, what about OMVs? OMVs is short for “Outer Membrane Vesicles”. These are little bubbles produced by bacteria. Plants also consider bacteria as something potentially dangerous, just like us. When a plant senses a bacterium, her first reaction is to turn on her fight mode.
Recently, OMVs are being researched as potential vaccine delivery systems! Perhaps we will see a COVID-19 vaccine that uses OMVs one day...
There are some bacteria that produce more OMVs than others. We grew the little bacteria in our lab to find out which ones produce the most OMVs.
We applied the OMVs on our plants. Hopefully, this would stimulate the plants’ immune response without harming it.
And it worked! The plants who were treated with our OMVs showed an immune response, meaning they reacted to our OMVs. And this will help her to be prepared for a real pathogen attack.
In our project, we have laid the groundwork for a new plant protection strategy by showing immune activity by plants who were treated with our OMVs. However, we haven’t managed to test this reaction in field trials nor did we do long term studies showing how OMV treatments could affect a plant’s growth.
We think that it’s important to move away from classical defense strategies like synthetic pesticides and hope that our project will inspire more research in this direction.
For more details, you can visit our Description page.