Who will your 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 Cyanothece sp. ATTC 51142 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 such as Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803. 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.
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