Team:SJTU-software/Agriculture
Investigation and Problems
This year, we interviewed professor Dabing Zhang, who is an expert in agriculture and synthetic biology. He gave us many new opinions about how to bind synthetic biology with agriculture and make those researches in synthetic biology beneficial for our agriculture industry.
TThe interview details can be seen in our Integrated_HP page, the link is shown as below:
https://2020.igem.org/Team:SJTU-software/Integrated_HP
The idea that we have to double food production by 2050 to feed the 9 billion people is the most worrying thing of all. Feeding the growing population without further destroying the environment is one of the greatest challenges of our time. Farmers around the world are pushing the limits to increase food production. Can science solve the upcoming food crisis? Do scientists hold the key to feed a hungry planet? Considering such an increasingly critical situation, how could we manage to feed another 2 billion people? We have to solve those problems, or a lot of people are going to die.
At the same time, the problem of hidden hunger cannot be ignored. Hidden hunger, as a symptom of hunger caused by an inability to ensure proper nutrient absorption, focuses on elemental imbalance rather than volume in satiety. In 2016, about 2 billion people worldwide were suffering from hidden hunger, and the number of hidden hunger in China reached 300 million.
China is making rapid progress in tackling hunger. Thirty years ago, one in three Chinese people was suffering from hunger. Today, less than one in 10 Chinese people is hungry. No other country has helped so many people out of hunger in such a short period as China.
Solutions and methods
Our project designed a database to help experimental research of stress-tolerance related to one of the Chinese traditional food crops, Oryza sativa L. The database included gene, RNA-seq, protein information, etc. of Oryza sativa L. and helped to evaluate and tag the undiscovered genes so that we can recommend genes most possibly related to stress-tolerance to researchers.
We focused more on the stress-tolerance genes rather than other genes. We used our unique methods to find the origin gene between all stress-tolerance genes and clustered these genes.
The difference between agriculture and synthetic biology is that agriculture focuses more on the real world, which also reminds us of the importance of the stress-tolerance genes. The rice itself is a much more widely spread species compared with other well-studied plants like arabidopsis. The stress-tolerance genes can be extremely different according to the area the plant grow. To find the correct genes in one specific area globally, it is especially important for scientists to use the right gene when doing rice variety transformation. To help scientists solve this problem, we added a new functional part, which mainly focused on the stress-tolerance genes and provide them with the original gene of a cluster of stress-tolerance genes.
