A new way of monitoring air quality
Plants as CO2 biosensors
In this post-pandemic world, air quality is a term that has become familiar, entering every household. Control of the air we breathe is now key to maintaining safe and clean spaces. The pandemic and all the social and environmental changes we are living in; droughts, wildfires, pollution, power shortage, lack of resources, and the need of more eco-friendly spaces have made us think. We wondered how we could monitor air quality in a more nature-friendly way.
So, we thought about plants. Hence, the solution that we want to provide is to make plants capable of sensing CO2 levels, developing an easy, cheap, and eco-friendly method of measuring air quality. This way we give an alternative to the usage of electric CO2 sensors which has grown exponentially during the last few years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We are Yassin Somoue Chafik, Alba Rodriguez Iriguibel, Íñigo Yániz Ibáñez, Mikel Jimenez Gil, Judith Carlos Martin, and Emel Samuilova Kalvuneva, a group of High School Senior students. We are a group of people that come from different High Schools. We didn’t know each other before we started the project but after working all summer together we have gotten very close.
Outside our workplace, the Planetarium of Pamplona, there is a unique landmark: the Galaxy Garden. A representation on which celestial bodies take form as plants and can be seen without the need of a telescope. It's a place in which astronomy and biology fuse in a very harmonious way, just like STEM disciplines working together to make humanity advance. Our project’s name aims to represent the union between plant synthethic biology and space.