Food Insecurity and Nutrition

Food insecurity is especially challenging because it affects communities in a multitude of ways and can be cyclical. For instance, during the winter months individuals may be forced to choose between heating and eating. Families may be more impacted during school holidays, when schools no longer provide free lunches.

Globally, over 3 billion people cannot access healthy diets. Moderate and severe food insecurity have been steadily climbing for the past six years.

Locally in London, there are now over 70,000 suffering from food insecurity. The issue is only worsening as the cost of living, including gas, heating and food prices, skyrocket this winter as a result of the Ukraine crisis.

Zero Hunger: Our Focus

The SDG of Zero Hunger (2) is the inspiration behind our project. From early stages we were set on addressing this goal, given that food security is becoming increasingly significant and vulnerable.This led us to learn that fungal diseases are responsible for a great deal of this problem, causing yield losses of up to 30% and accounting for 75% of plant diseases, which ultimately informed our biofungicide design.

Other SDGs we support

Our project also supports other SDGs, in particular:

Reduced Inequalities (10) Sporadicate is designed to reduce inequalities in the farming sector. We chose to use spores as they are easy to manufacture, durable, have a long shelf life and have very minimal storage requirements, which we confirmed with manufacturers. This means they are easy to ship anywhere in the world, including to developing countries which may take much longer to deliver to. It also means that shipment and storage of spores will be cheaper compared to other biofungicide options. This paves the way to our product becoming a more accessible, low-cost option for farmers from any background.

Responsible Consumption and Production (12) Sporadicate is designed to be responsible and sustainable for the environment. Chemical fungicides are the main current solution, and were used by all of the farmers we reached out to. However, they have negative impacts on the environment, causing toxicity by leaching into groundwater. Resistant cultivars, another popular option, are simply not a sustainable solution to fungal diseases in the long term. They are constantly outcompeted by mutant pathogens and cannot be produced at a pace that can keep up. They are also very expensive to develop and thus inaccessible, and as we found, not as frequently used by farmers.

Collaborating with other teams

Our partnership with the Paris Bettencourt overgrad and Costa Rica undergrad teams this year addressed the goal of Reduced Inequalities (10), as we were able to support each other and provide sequencing access to the Costa Rica team which they were not able to receive locally.

Our UK wide meetup was also a great opportunity for dialogue surrounding the SDGs with key academics and other iGEM teams. It was particularly relevant to speak to Dr Jenny Molloy from the Open Bioeconomy lab, whose research aims to develop accessible lab equipment to reduce inequalities.

Building on WUSTL 2018

Our idea was inspired by the UWash St Louis team at early stages. They set up a foundation for a ribitol-based sensing system to allow for early detection of stem rust. Through their human practices approach, they found that most farmers didn't know about resistance genes in their crop so wouldn’t know which strains would be virulent. This informed their decision to set up a detection mechanism. We thought that this was a great step towards Zero Hunger - early detection is key to reducing yield losses caused by stem rust and their system was informed by what would be practical for real farmers.

However, we thought that early detection on its own may not be sufficient to have a significant impact on yield loss. Early detection may require constant monitoring, and once stem rust is detected, chemical fungicides must be re-sprayed which is cost and labour intensive. Moreover, as we found through our Human Practices, there are many fungal diseases beyond stem rust. Different diseases are prominent in different regions, and mutations constantly occur. This drives the need for a solution that is more general purpose.