Team:Newcastle/Demonstrate
Alternative Roots
Demonstrate
Alternative Roots
What worked - and didn’t work - in 2018 for Alternative Roots.
Overview
Alternative roots is a mulit-component project proposing that plant endophytes - microbes that live harmlessly within plant tissues - can be engineered to enhance beneficial plant : microbial interactions. This may be achieved, for example, by engineering plant endophytes to synthesise chemoattractants of free-living, nitrogen fixing bacteria. We examined both the feasibility of the biology and considered how this technology might be viably deployed in our local community. Here we highlight some of the conclusions from our work:
Chassis Development
- We have demonstrated colonisation of plant tissues by our Pseudomonas sp.
- We have demonstrated that this species is genetically transformable.
- We have demonstrated that transformed our Pseudomonas sp. can colonise root tissues.
- We have identified an origin or replication and two selectable antibiotic markers (gentamicin and streptomycin) that can be used with our Pseudomonas sp.