Difference between revisions of "Team:WashU StLouis/Human Practices"

Revision as of 00:06, 18 October 2018

In late May, Kyle travelled to Ethiopia to meet with farmers, NGOs, and universities.. Our initial project idea was to detect certain avirulence factors secreted by Pgt, and based on the response from certain resistance genes, determine if a farmer’s specific line of wheat would be resistant to the races of stem rust that were present or not. However, many of the farmers were unaware of what specific resistance genes their lines of wheat had. Therefore, we altered our project design to include a general detection mechanism for stem rust in addition to the race-specific detection in order to provide the information that would be most helpful to some of the farmers that would be aided by the results of our project.

In June, Kyle met with farmers, NGOs, and governmental organizations in Uganda. His work in Uganda showed, once again, the need for a general stem rust detection mechanism. The farmers also provided significant feedback on the hardware of the project, what information they wanted the hardware to display, and what was most feasible and convenient technologically for them. In addition, due to this visit, we recognized the need for an educational component of our project to allow farmers to use the resources available to them, such as the various forms of pesticides, safely and effectively.

Cam met with Victor Mowatt, the CEO of Bulk Ag Innovations, an agricultural technology company, to discuss our hardware. He was worried that our device could be knocked down and potentially crushed in a field that used agricultural machinery. Therefore, while we originally intended to have multiple devices around a field with built in spore traps, we decided to design a device that could be housed in a separate location with detachable spore traps that could be hung around the field’s periphery where they would not be affected by machinery.

Our team met with several plant pathologists at the Monsanto Research Center who had previously worked with wheat rust resistance genes. They reviewed our project design and made recommendations of other experts in the field to reach out to. Previously, we had intended on expressing Sr35 intracellularly, where it would interact with AvrSr35 secreted by Pgt. However, they recognized that although AvrSr35 can enter wheat cells, it is not necessarily able to enter yeast cells, and suggested that we use Aga2 to display Sr35 on the surface of our yeast cells to eliminate the issue of AvrSr35 entering the yeast cells altogether. Although our project design focuses on demonstrating the interaction of Sr35 and AvrSr35 inside yeast cells first, we incorporated this advice into the future direction of our project by improving the Aga2 + linker (BBa_K2663004) part in the iGEM registry so that it would later be ready to incorporate into our Sr35 mechanism.

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Our team met with Dr. Shah, a researcher at the Danforth Plant Sciences Center who studies plant defensin proteins, another method of innate plant resistance to fungal pathogens. He compared resistance and defensin proteins, noted the benefits and drawbacks, and discussed how both are being studied as methods of providing durable resistance to pathogen infection. Prior to our meeting with Dr. Shah, our team had intended to use a polystyrene membrane for our spore trap based on what we had previously read in literature. However, Dr. Shah informed us that any hydrophobic material could be used as a spore trap, so we decided to change the material of our membrane to a form of plastic (polyethylene) with a lower environmental impact.