Future work

Different parts affect the efficiency of degrading formaldehyde

We have constructed individual vectors with and without transit peptides, and vectors containing different part combinations. We hope to know the effects of transit peptides and different genes on the efficiency of degrading formaldehyde. And this work is ongoing.

Give the plants a "big mouth"

Because of the limited time, we have not cloned the stomatal regulation gene, AtAHA2, to the expression vectoras we planned to. So our next target would be cloning AtAHA2 gene and its promoter, GC1, to the expressing vector, transforming that to plants, and testing their abilities of absorbing formaldehyde.

Chloroplast transformation

The chloroplast is a pivotal organelle in plant cells and eukaryotic algae to carry out photosynthesis, which provides the primary source of the world’s food. The expression of foreign genes in chloroplasts offers several advantages over their expression in the nucleus: high-level expression, transgene stacking in operons and a lack of epigenetic interference allowing stable transgene expression. In addition, transgenic chloroplasts are generally not transmitted through pollen grains because of the cytoplasmic localization. And it meets the requirement of biosafety of iGEM. In the past two decades, great progress in chloroplast engineering has been made. So in the future work, we will tranform the genes into the chloroplast of plants.

More plants

By now our project is still in its basic research stage. And our experiments were on the model plant, tobacco. In the near future we will try it on some ornamental plants. Our super plant is still living in sealed boxes, and they will be cultivated in bigger circumstances, such as rooms, offices, automobile rooms, etc.

Pollen abortion detection

We brought in cysteine protease expression part which caused pollen abortion. We ensured biosafety of transgenic modified organism in this way. However, there is not enough time to wait until transgenic tobacco flowers. And this will be our future work.