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Project Description

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 have we been up to this summer?

There are two key components of our project:
Richard and Caroline have been working in the Pakrasi lab, and have been using genes from cyanobacteria to get nitrogen fixation working in E. coli . They are testing nitrogen fixation by running acetylene reduction assays and designing experiments to test the optimal criteria (ie. E. coli strains, temperature, pH, nitrogen source) to get maximum results. Ben and Jeffrey have been working in the Moon lab, and have been busy cloning plasmids to create a system that represses and expresses a fluorescent protein with the presence and absence of light and running experiments to test the induction levels compared to various positive and negative controls. Our next step would be to combine the two "mini" projects into one so that light will regulate the transcription of the nitrogen fixation genes.

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.