Many people around the world love having indoor plants to take care of and watch how they make their environment more beautiful and clean. In fact, there’s an important growth in indoor plant market projected for the next decade.
Nevertheless, having indoor plants can be a very difficult thing to accomplish for many people thanks to all the specific conditions and care that these plants need such as watering, light exposure, temperature, pH, salt concentration, etc, etc, etc, leading to many people ending up killing their beloved plants because of being unable to detect and solve this threats on time. This project proposes to engineer the rhizobacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens, species that inhabits many houseplants’ roots, to have a genetic circuit that expresses a reporter gene, such as RFP, in the presence of a stress signaling molecule secreted in those roots, such as the hormone ABA, and that the expression of this gene is proportional to the magnitude of stress.
Combining this with an UV light, it would create an early stress-detecting system for houseplants that could help millions of plant lovers to grow their beautiful plants, assessing the presence of important health issues, and giving them time to act in the case of detecting a stress.
a. Motivation for pursuing your project
I’ve always dedicated myself to basic science, I love simply discovering how things work because they’re interesting. Nevertheless, by signing up to this course I committed myself to learn more of the application part of science, meaning doing stuff that impacts directly peoples lives. So I tried to think, throughout the development of this course, “how can I engineer an organism to create something that common, non-scientific people would actually like?” and the idea came to me when I read a paper about engineering rhizobacteria to detect plant secreted-metabolites via genetic circuit design, and then I thought “why couldn’t I create a biosensor based on this idea that allows common people to assess the health state of their home or apartment plants?” and I think that if worked out, this could be a very useful tool for a lot of people.
b. Current state of knowledge
The idea of engineering genetic circuits in root colonizing bacteria (rhizobacteria) has been widely explored in literature. Dundas & Dinneny (2022) offer a review of many different approaches for this idea, including its use to augment root growth/development, nutrient acquisition, stress resilience, and carbon sequestration into soils (actuators), which basically means potentiating the benefits that rhizobacteria generally offer to plants, but also some novel applications such as using them as biosensors to assess the metabolic state of the plant via root-secreted molecules.
For these means, they made a general scheme of the genetic circuit for rhizobacteria biosensors, with the different modules that can be engineered to determine its specific characteristics.
