Inspiration and description
This year, we have come back to Earth, and we have realized that air quality has become a very important aspect, so we want to make plants that can serve as CO2 sensors.
Our inspiration
In this pandemic world we live in, having proper air quality has become a very important way of protecting ourselves. CO2 levels in the air serve, in an indirect way, to determine the presence of harmful particles, for example, viruses in the air, that are pretty difficult to determine in a direct way. So, we sense CO2 as it is a gas that is easily detected, and it is a product of human respiration. This way we can have an approximate idea of how crowded spaces are and can be an indicator for air renewal.
In all scientific advances the social context is important, but in our project, it has a huge weight because we try to come up with a solution that considers some of the problems that are striking our planet. As we have just said, we live in a pandemic world, but the problems do not end there. We are facing massive fires that end with entire ecosystems and more and more frequent droughts that indicate a climate change. There is an urgent need for the creation of eco-friendly spaces, in which plants have a huge role. The last events have shown us also the lack of resources, produced by the continuous production of electronic components that need rare metals.
Taking all this into account, the Navarra_BG team has thought of a way of saving energy, resources, and rare metals, the ones needed to produce all the technological components that we use daily. Trying to give a solution that helped in all these problems, we came up with the idea that plants could be a good option to sense air quality instead of the devices we already have, as it is a more sustainable option.
What’s more, another less-known property of plants is the therapeutic properties that they have on humans. In a study made by Richard Thompson, they said that plants have beneficial effects on mental health 1 .These benefits go from, reducing stress, fear, and anger to even sadness. In addition, the study added that observing nature can also reduce blood pressure, pulse rate, and muscle tension. They are, additionally, decorative objects that in a workplace or a house are more pleasing to the eye than common CO2 sensors.
What people think of our idea is also important to us so, our team has made a poll in which we ask other iGEM teams if they would rather have an electronic CO2 sensor or a plant with the same function, these are the results of the poll:
Previous Navarra_BG teams have been very connected with space, but this year we have come back home, and we are trying to help with the problems of Earth. However, all comes back to space and the solutions created for our planet can be also applied to the ISS.
In space, resources are a very valuable thing so astronauts must save the most they can. Plants can also be a solution to this problem because the resources that a plant needs to live are simple and they are O 2 producers, a very important resource for human life.
In addition to all these arguments, astronauts live in a constant lockdown, surrounded by electronic machines in charge of making life possible outside Earth. Some studies made by NASA concluded that astronauts spend most of their free time in the Vegetable Production System, known as Veggie, a space garden residing on the space station. “Having something green and growing--a little piece of Earth--to take care of when living and working in an extreme and stressful environment could have tremendous value and impact” 2
Plants may also be critical to guarantee the security of astronauts in long-duration missions. "The farther and longer humans go away from Earth, the greater the need to be able to grow plants for food, atmosphere recycling, and psychological benefits. I think that plant systems will become important components of any long-duration exploration scenario"2
Our project's objective is to use plants as CO2 sensors. This requires the identification of promoter sequences induced by high CO2 concentrations. To develop our project first, we have studied the different expression levels of several Arabidopsis thaliana CO2 inducible promoters, under ambient and elevated CO2 conditions. As a proof of concept, we have used the GFP reporter gene to measure the transcription level of each promoter using Nicotiana benthamiana transitory transformation.
[1]Clinical Medicine 2018 Vol 18, No 3: 201–5
[2]https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/meals_ready_to_eat