Understanding our Problem
At each stage of our project development, from project ideation to the integration of feedback from end-users, our team has continued to reflect on the social, moral, and environmental impacts of our project. We wanted to develop a wheat variety that would be resistant to high temperatures while also suiting the needs of end-users and potential stakeholders. Ultimately, our project is meant to address the global issues of food insecurity and energy conservation through limiting the use of water and irrigation used in agriculture. Our Education and Communication page highlights our various educational initiatives to survey public perceptions of GMO foods and address societal stigmas through generating an open discussion, as well as workshops and discussions on increasing access to synthetic biology innovations.
To ensure that the product we develop would be useful for farmers and the agricultural industry, as well as good for consumers and the general public, our team spoke to people from different areas of expertise in order to tailor our product to best meet the needs of our end-users. Through our interviews, we learned that there is indeed a need for an innovative solution to the problem of heat stress in crops and that our genetically engineered wheat variety would be received well by the public.
End User Perspectives: Canada
In order to truly learn about Canadian agriculture and the impacts of extremely high temperatures on commonly grown crops, we reached out to farmers across British Columbia to gain further insights. We wanted to learn first-hand how farmers had been impacted by the high temperatures during last year’s extreme heat waves and solicit their feedback on the design of our heat tolerant wheat.
Bryce Rashleigh
We first travelled to Saanichton Farms, situated in the heart of the Saanichton Peninsula on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We were warmly greeted by Bryce and his son, who soon revealed that farming has been a part of their family for several generations. While giving us a tour of his fields, Bryce explained that his smaller scale farm relies heavily on rainfall to provide water to crops as infrastructure for irrigation is limited. As regions experience increasingly high temperatures, crops without a constant supply of water are rendered susceptible to drought.
To understand our problem further, we also asked Bryce about the effects that last year’s droughts and wildfires had on his crop harvests. We wanted to learn how warm temperatures around the globe are impacting local farmers. Bryce related that farming for him is truly about resilience and adapting to the seasonal conditions in order to feed his people. He is a strong believer in sustainability and mentioned that a heat-tolerant wheat variety, such as the one we are developing, would be of great benefit to his farm. However, he explained that although his farm uses herbicides and all agricultural innovations available to him, people living in the Saanichton Peninsula seem to be making a switch over to organic foods. This insight was of particular interest as we wanted to explore public perspectives and the general stigma surrounding GMO and non-organic foods. Our conversation with Bryce later led to our GMO discussion panel, where we interviewed diverse speakers on the public perceptions of GMOs and explored the societal impacts of agricultural technologies.
Through our visit to Saanichton Farms, we gained a more clear understanding of the problem our team is striving to address. However, as the farm does not usually grow wheat, focusing rather on barley and other cereals, we decided to visit the neighbouring Field Five Farm to gain more wheat-specific insights.
Kyle Mitchell
At Field Five Farms, we had the opportunity to learn about how changing temperatures have impacted the growth and harvest of wheat. Kyle Mitchell, who runs the farm, mentioned that they use their wheat to produce malt, which usually requires a different nutritional content compared to crops used for milling and baked goods. Kyle mentioned that wheat and barley with a high protein content are great for making malt. The protein content of the crop depends on the balance between nitrogen levels and the amount of irrigation used for the crop.
Although we learned that extremely warm temperatures decreased overall crop yield, last year’s heat waves and droughts had actually worked well for the malt industry. Interestingly, drought stress increases the protein content of wheat, making it a great choice for malting though it would not be used for food. It was interesting to learn how the same seasonal conditions had impacted different neighbouring farms in the same geographical region.
Clayton Fox
To understand the impacts of the heat waves on farmers’ opinions on GMO crops, we also visited Silver Rill farms in Saanichton, B.C. Clayton Fox showed us around some of his fields where beets, carrots, and corn were growing. Clayton mentioned that he would be open to using GMO varieties in his field and that Stokes Seeds, a leading supplier of quality seeds in the United States and Canada, had several genetically modified corn varieties in their catalogue. Clayton mentioned that organic farming may be possible for farms operating on a smaller scale but larger scale fields would need to be sprayed with herbicides and have GMO varieties to subvert the cost and laborious efforts of manual weeding.
Kelly Boles
Our conversation with Vern Crawford, a retired large-scale farm owner from the province of Alberta, revealed the need to speak with stakeholders beyond local farmers. Vern kindly put us in contact with Kelly Boles from Center Field Solutions, whose work as a seed consultant to farmers would provide us with insight into seed selection and developing of different crop strains to suit farmer needs.
As a seed consultant with over 20 years of experience, Kelly explained that his work primarily focuses on communicating with breeders to bring the most appropriate seeds to farmers, while advising farmers on the selection of seeds and grains based on their qualities. In many cases, high yield is the most attractive and desired trait for selection of wheat seeds; this is followed by the protein content of the wheat as well as resistance to climate-based factors such as drought and high temperatures. Kelly assured us that climate-resistant wheat would be a lucrative option for farmers if high yield and appropriate protein content for wheat were guaranteed. As farmers need to harvest as much crop from the season as possible, seeds guaranteeing high yield are preferred over varieties offering protection against climate-based factors, which are susceptible to change every year.
Our project focuses on increasing heat tolerance of wheat through the expression of SBPase and other enzymes to increase yield. Thus, we hope that our future product will provide farmers with a dual-targeting option to acquire seeds which result in greater yield, being more economically feasible, as well as offering protection against climate-based parameters such as high temperatures and heat waves.
End User Perspectives: India
Conversations with BC-based farmers highlighted how the climate-based decisions and opinions they were expressing were specific to the microclimate of Canada. Fei Luo, co-founder of Liven Proteins, emphasized to us the need for a solid value proposition that is applicable worldwide in competition with the top crops in all areas of the world.
To obtain a more representative sample of farmer insights, we spoke to Pavneet Kingra, Head of the Department of Climate Change and Agricultural Meteorology in Punjab Agricultural University. Through her involvement in research and teaching in agriculture, she was able to represent farmers’ insights through second-hand observations. Earlier this year, India suffered a heat wave that severely affected their wheat yields, forcing the country to halt international exports to reach its domestic demand. Pavneet emphasized how dire this situation was for farmers, and offered her expert opinion on the climate-based parameters affecting sensitivity to heat loss. Night-time temperature (minimum temperature), time of sowing and sunshine hours determine susceptibility to heat stress the most. There is a movement beginning in Punjab towards green agricultural practices, but these usually revolve around administrative controls like adjusting time of sowing. She expressed that policies could and would be open to more biological-based engineering controls towards a greener agriculture in the area.
Expert Insight on End User Perspectives
Dr. Sandra Yanni
Dr. Sandra Yanni is a researcher at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and her area of focus is in water and energy use efficiencies in agriculture. She states that irrigation alone is not enough to offset heat stress due to water loss through evaporation, and decreasing accessibility of water in farm areas. She states the most effective and sustainable methods for reducing heat stress in areas of high average temperature and incidences of extreme weather is through drought/heat resistant crops, intercropping to reduce level of solar heat exposure, and irrigation when accessible. High soil temperatures may also reduce microbial activity or cause shifts in microbial community structure, which would affect decomposition of organic matter in soil, disease dynamics, nutrient flow, and possibly symbiotic functions, all of which can affect crop properties.
Dr. Budong Qian
Dr. Budong Qian is a research scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and their work focuses on sustainable crop production in Canada under climate change. They state that the most significant area of agriculture modification is concerning increasing global average temperatures and more frequent weather extremes. Improving crop monitoring and irrigation is beneficial for crops in dry and arid regions, but availability and cost of water is preventative in widespread agriculture. Thus, drought/heat resistant plants may be more effective in the long run. They also mention that heat stress is greater when also accompanied by drought and that irrigation may reduce heat stress in this regard; however, not all heat waves are accompanied by droughts.
Evaluating Our Approach
Since our team has not previously worked with plant systems, we had a large learning curve to overcome in becoming familiar with working with wheat. Given that our promoter only works in wheat, we had to find a way to simulate a wheat system in the lab. Our initial proposal included using a cell-free wheat germ platform to test our constructs, but we decided to seek expert advice on the cost, time, and resource accessibility of this option against others, namely agrobacterium-mediated transformation and protoplast isolation and transfection.
Dr. Andrew Riseman
As an associate UBC professor, Dr. Riseman specializes in applied biology and plant breeding. His research involves the identification and optimization of relevant plant genes within sustainable food systems. Our conversation with Dr. Riseman illuminated the validity of some core concepts of our project.
We consulted Dr. Riseman to gain more information about addressing the problem of heat stress in plants in a sustainable manner through synthetic biology. Dr. Riseman mentioned that drought may be a potential confounding variable in studying heat stress, as plants have the ability to cool themselves in the presence of water. He advised us to look into literature in which only one abiotic factor (ie. temperature, or access to water) was manipulated in order to study its effects on plant stress. Dr. Riseman also brought to light that the intensity of heat stress effects changes with the different stages of wheat development. Upon further literature research driven by the suggestions mentioned during this interview, we found that the protection from heat stress is especially critical during the wheat seedling stage. As a result, our team decided to focus the rest of our project on using wheat seedlings for our heat stress model.
In addition, Dr. Riseman suggested we look further into the complexities of working with the hexaploid wheat genome. Our team worked on elucidating the upstream and downstream effects of ethylene on the hexaploid genome, which was explored by our dry-lab subteam.
René Inckemann
To evaluate the feasibility of our project within the context of iGEM, we spoke to René Inckemann from the iGEM Plant Synthetic Biology Committee. Having contributed as an advisor to the iGEM Marburg 2021 team, René’s experience with engineering chloroplasts from various plants and crops was crucial for the development of our project.
Our conversation with René provided valuable insights which ultimately shaped the direction of our wet-lab work. We discussed the advantages and challenges of testing our genetic circuit with cell-free systems compared to using protoplasts as our tool of choice; we learned that cell-free systems offer a snapshot of the cell’s components and may not be the best tool to study response to heat stress in the context of our project. René advised us that working with protoplasts would be difficult due to their fragility and low yield if the wheat plant development stage is not correctly timed. We also received some pointers on protoplast isolation.
Overall, we learned that using protoplasts would be more conducive to the goals of our project, though the journey would not be easy. We also realized that our knowledge of wheat was limited and soon after we sought expert advice from researchers working directly with different varieties of wheat.
Dr. Liang Song
Dr. Liang Song works as an assistant professor in the UBC Department of Botany. Her research focuses on the environmental and genetic control of seed development via abscisic acid-regulated gene expression.
As we were determined to use protoplasts as our tool of choice, Dr. Song helped clarify some of the intricacies of this method. Firstly, she informed us that the protoplast retrieval procedure alone will trigger cell stress, bringing to our attention the necessity for proper controls as genes related to co-stress will be upregulated. She provided us with several methods of reducing plant stress during the procedure, including being gentle when working with any type of protoplasts and checking the temperature of incubation to reduce unwanted heat stress.
Dr. Song advised us to look for inspiration in crops naturally grown in warmer climates. As a result of this suggestion, our team began to compare gene expression in wheat plants grown in a hot climate versus a cold climate, while further unraveling the genetic factors that are upregulated in the cultivars grown in warmer climates. This has inspired our dry-lab climate modelling efforts, carried out in collaboration with the iGEM IISER-Pune team.
Dr. Guus Bakkeren
As an adjunct professor at the UBC Department of Botany, Dr. Guus Bakkeren’s research interests lie in understanding the mechanisms by which fungal infections affect Canadian cereal crops, as well as designing novel methods to introduce disease resistance and protection in crops. With his work focusing on wheat, barley, and oat, we hoped that Dr. Bakkeren would be able to provide insight into the most suitable methods of delivering transgenes into wheat, our organism of choice.
In addition to discussing the suitability of agroinfiltration for the purpose of our gene delivery, we also consulted Dr. Bakkeren to learn more about the isolation of protoplasts from wheat specifically. We learned that although it would not be trivial to isolate protoplasts from wheat seedlings, agroinfiltration would require the use of large growth chambers to house whole wheat plants and would result in transient gene expression, likely undetectable on a whole-plant level.
To begin our initial wheat protoplast isolation experiments, Dr. Bakkeren generously sent us a batch of seeds from the ‘Fielder’ wheat cultivar, a type of soft, white wheat. Furthermore, we received a protoplast isolation protocol from Ana Montenegro, a former PhD student in Dr. Bakkeren’s lab working with barley protoplasts. This procedure was used for our initial protoplast isolation procedures and later optimized.
Discovering the Impact of Our Solution
Dr. Katie Koralesky
As a postdoctoral researcher at UBC, Dr. Koralesky’s research focuses on understanding the social, moral, and ethical dimensions of gene editing in farm animals. From her experience with literature analysis, surveys, and data analysis on the topic of public perception of gene editing, she was able to provide insight on how our team could start to gain an understanding of our product’s market performance and how a modified strain of wheat would be perceived by end-users and potential stakeholders. She advised our team to take a look at the public engagement model rather than the traditional public deficit model, analyzing where opinions are coming from both sides of the genetic modification discourse. This was incorporated into our outreach and educational initiatives, inspiring our GMO discussion panel where the team got a chance to hear from opposing perspectives.
Fei Luo
Liven proteins produce protein ingredients without animals through bioreactors and engineering yeast. The company focuses on using off-products from the food industry and using it for above mentioned protein production. For example: some of their techniques involve using fermentation to make animal free proteins and developing microbe-produced proteins to provide the same texture/taste/nutrition as a meat-based diet.
Fei Luo, co-founder and CEO of Liven Proteins, advised us to not get stuck on the technicalities of what we are using to reach the value proposition, rather just focus on the value proposition. We need to look at the current landscape and ask ourselves if heat tolerant wheat is what we really need right now and to think about what the next step is including the impact we want to make. The value proposition as impacted by her insights are outlined in the Entrepreneurship page.
UBC Farm
To determine if end-users of processed wheat products would be likely to purchase and consume our product over competitors currently in the market, we visited a farmers market to interview shoppers first-hand. The UBC Farm Market is held weekly on site at our campus’ farm, providing fresh produce to families and students living near the university.
We got the opportunity to speak with three customers in depth, and gain their perspectives on their food being obtained from a GMO that is more sustainable. All three customers expressed their interest in reducing the carbon footprint created by the food consumed, but that the information regarding the environmental impact of their products wasn’t easily accessible while grocery shopping. They had a positive opinion on GMOs, stating that the “GMO free” angle seemed to be a marketing strategy, and the regulation for labelling on “organic” foods wasn’t properly regulated. In addition, one shopper had assumed most of their produce was in some part genetically modified anyways. They also believed that GMO crops were a useful tool to address global food needs, and that it could also contribute to problems brought on by smoke and drought in addition to heat. Although our sample size is not large or random enough to generalize any conclusions, it was insightful to hear personal opinions about our project and allowed us to gauge an initial idea on how customers may react to our product in the market.
Dr. Ela Dudek
Dr. Ela Dudek is the VP of Product at Future Fields, a company focused on using fruit flies for production of recombinant proteins used in research. Although we initially saw public perceptions of GM foods as one of our main areas of concern, Dr. Dudek suggested that other pressures would push people to be more supportive of GM technologies. Dr. Dudek believes that with big enough issues at hand, such as climate change, people will see themselves forced to see change as solutions. This echoed the perspectives we received from our end-user insights at the UBC Farm.