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Why are we doing this project?

How does our project work?

Right now, our plan is to divide and conquer. Ben and Jeffrey are working in Dr. Tae Seok Moon's lab with Cheryl Immethun on the transcription regulation project while Richard and Caroline are working in Dr. Himadri Pakrasi's lab with Dr. Deng Liu, Bert Berla, and Andrew Ng on getting the cyanobacterial nif cluster to function in E. coli . We are looking to study how these nitrogen fixation genes function in a foreign environment and to generate a light-senstive transcription system; our end goal is to unite these two projects to create a system that fixes nitrogen only in the absence of light.

What do we plan to do?

Two Key Components to our Project:

We are using genes from cyanobacteria to get nitrogen fixation working in E. coli and are regulating the transcription of those genes with light.

Who will our project help?

Our project is the first step of a much larger, much more complex endeavor. Nitrogen overabundance and nitrogen depletion are simultaneously big stumbling blocks in modern agriculture. The solution to both of these problems would be to endow plants themselves with the ability to fix nitrogen so that they could autonomously supply their own nitrogen for proteins, DNA, etc. We are taking the first step towards this ambitious goal by studying how the genes for nitrogen fixation from cyanobacteria work in different environments and constructing an artificial transcriptional system. We are currently working in E. coli because it is easy to engineer, but the next step would be to move into a cyanobacteria more closely related to chloroplasts. We hope that by making these initial steps that we may be helping to pave the way for future research that may put an end to world hunger.