WELCOME TO GREEN CANARY!

We are the NRP-UEA-Norwich iGEM team based in Norwich, Norfolk, UK. This year the team consists of 6 undergraduate student all studying within the biological sciences. Our project is entitled Green Canary, representing three aspects of the team and project.

Our Project

Food security is becoming an ever prominent global issue, by 2050 food production needs to increase by 70% to feed the 9 billion people that will inhabit our planet. However, dedicating new land to farming may not be viable and as a global society we will have to utilise the land available. In 2012 OECD reported that 40% of global crop yields are lost to pests and diseases, applying synthetic biology we aim to potentially reduce the vast void of crops which are inedible due to pathogen infection. Whilst our combined human practices and ethics research is exploring the ethical responsibilities of scientists to provide food security for an increasing population and to allow members of the public to choose the ways in which their food is produced.

Our aim is to produce diagnostic sentinel plants that will rapidly diagnose the presence of specific selected plant pathogens. The sentinels will exhibit a clear chromoprotein expression signal within 24 hours of pathogen infection. The signal can be observed by the human eye or interpreted by a remote sensing system capable of alerting the grower who can take necessary action, potentially by appropriate agrochemical application before the disease progresses to symptomatic pathogenesis in the crop.

Tips

We are currently working on providing teams with some easy to use design templates.
In the meantime you can also view other team wikis for inspiration! Here are some very good examples

• 2013 SDU Denmark
• 2013 SYSU China
• 2013 Shenxhen BGIG ATCG
• 2013 Colombia Unianades
• 2013 Lethbridge

For a full wiki list, you can visit iGEM 2013 web sites and iGEM 2012 web sites lists.

This wiki will be your team’s first interaction with the rest of the world, so here are a few tips to help you get started:

• State your accomplishments! Tell people what you have achieved from the start.
• Be clear about what you are doing and what you plan to do.
• You have a global audience! Consider the different backgrounds that your users come from.
• Make sure information is easy to find; nothing should be more than 3 clicks away.
• Avoid using very small fonts and low contrast colors; information should be easy to read.
• Start documenting your project as early as possible; don’t leave anything to the last minute before the Wiki Freeze. For a complete list of deadlines visit the iGEM 2013 calendar
• Have lots of fun!