Hello internet traveler. Welcome to our homepage. Here you can learn all about our project as well as the problem we are trying to address. Feel free to explore some other tabs for more information.
Run-off of excess nitrogen from agricultural fertilizers is a significant factor in the eutrophication of aquatic environments. Furthermore, environmental stressors and low soil fertility for legumes result in low legume yields, a common problem, especially in the agriculture sectors of developing countries. Our goal was to modify rhizobia, bacteria that form a symbiotic relationship with the roots of leguminous plants and fix environmental nitrogen, to increase nitrogen fixation in root nodules. Our hope is that by improving the fixation of environmental nitrogen, farmers can reduce the amount of nitrogen needed to fertilize crops, thereby keeping aquatic environments healthy and promoting economic growth in developing countries through sustainable agriculture. To this end, we attempted to increase the production of trehalose by overexpressing in rhizobia the otsA gene, which encodes trehalose-6-phosphate synthase, a key enzyme in the synthetic cascade for trehalose. We will examine nodule formation in common beans inoculated with our modified rhizobia and evaluate several features of our plants.
