Team:NRP-UEA-Norwich

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NRP UEA Norwich iGEM 2014

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.

Project

The 2014 NRP-UEA iGEM team have developed a diagnostic plant pathogen biosensor ‘The Green Canary’. The sentinels will exhibit a clear chromoprotein signal that can be observed by the human eye or even interpreted by a remote sensing system capable of alerting the grower or making appropriate agrochemical application before the disease progresses to symptomatic pathogenesis in the crop...

Team

Our team consists of six year two enthusiastic undergraduate students studying a wide range of degree disciplines at UEA, from Microbiology to Biohemistry, we have all the bases covered. Coupled with a group of inspirational advisors on hand...

Human Practices

Raising the profile of synthetic biology and iGEM as well as gathering opinions and ideas from the public to feed in and shape our project have proved key to our human practices events this year. From giving tutorials to scientists and students about Golden Gate assembly to arranging events focused on Food Security we have had an action packed summer...

Judging Criteria

We have generated a visual representation of how our iGEM project fulfils each element of the judging criteria...

Safety

Safety is of the upmost importance to iGEM and UEA. We have collated our risk assessments alongside our submitted safety forms to ensure a safe and productive summer...

Lab Notebook

Explore what it’s like to be an iGEM student for a day in our lab. We have stored our day to day iGEM activities in our online lab book together with our protocols...

A big thank you to our sponsors