Part improvement
For future iGEM projects we want to answer to this question: Can we grow plant in Mars? Mars has an environment that is harsh for life. Mars has a thin atmosphere primarily made of carbon dioxide, Mars receives about half of the sunlight we get on Earth, due to the absence of an ozone layer more ultraviolet radiation reaches the ground, the temperature is much colder than Earth (-60ºC) and gravity is around a third of that on Earth.
These are all challenges that are within the capability of modern synthetic biology. A rational use of synthetic biology help us to develop crops specifically for Mars. This will include improving photosynthesis efficiency and photoprotection (to help protect plants from sunlight and UV rays), as well as adaptation to reduce gravity environments, and adaptation to grow in soils with potentially harmful characteristics.
Anthocyanins protect leaves from the stress of photoinhibitory light fluxes by absorbing the excess photons that would otherwise be intercepted by chlorophyll b. Plant with high levels of anthocyanins will have more capacity to survive in an ambient with high irradiance. In our project we added a new gene to the Part BBa_K3045002 (PAP1, that code for a transcriptional factor that induce the accumulation of anthocyanins). This new plasmid will allow us to produce and purify proteins from plants growing in a like-Mars environment.
Gravity is an important influence on root growth and starch plays an important role in the plant response to gravity. Our hypothesis is that a plant that accumulate more starch that a WT plant would respond to gravity in a more efficient way. So, we propose to use the Arabidopsis Sex1 mutant (starch superaccumulator) as chassis to produce proteins of interest in Mars.
Some places on Earth have been used to study Mars, since their environments are somewhat similar to conditions on Mars. One Mars analogue site of particular interest is Rio Tinto in Spain. This place is an extreme environment with a constant acidic pH. We propose transfer some genes from extremophile organisms to plants to endow them with new properties adapted to Mars’ environment. Specifically, we will produce plants able to grow in acid environments using a gene that codes for a RNA binding protein from Methyloccocus capsulatus.