Providing a solution to the green seed problem could be the key to alleviating losses felt by those in the canola industry. Our team’s vision was to make yOIL that solution. In order to do so, we had to ensure that we created something that was effective, usable, and targeted areas which impacted people the most. The only way to achieve this goal, was to integrate our end-users in creating our solutions.

We utilized a human-centered design process and identified a set of steps to guide our work. This lead to integration with key stake holders throughout the project lifecycle, and ultimately the all-encompassing solutions found in yOIL.

Before BioBrick design and lab work began, there were questions we needed answered. We needed to know what exactly the green seed issue entails. How large it is? Who does it impact? What is being done to stop it?

To answer these questions, we identified four groups of people that we needed to speak with. Our primary research indicated that there are two main entities impacted by the green seed issue: farmers and oil producers. In addition to those two, we also identified agronomists and organizational bodies working within the canola oil industry. From here, we initiated conversations about the green seed issue and discussed how we could utilize synthetic biology as a solution.

What did we discover?

Every person we talked to asserted the impact green seed has had on them and emphasized the need for new solutions that would mitigate the losses incurred.

Having identified and understood the multiple adverse aspects of the green seed problem, our team began brainstorming solutions.

After discussing and analyzing our stakeholders' needs, we decided on two synthetic biology solutions and one engineering based solution. These are all aimed at the oil processing stage where current methods are expensive, result in oil loss, and are not environmentally friendly.

To discover more about these solutions, click on the buttons below.

The above solutions focused on the oil processing stage. However, after hearing stories from farmers like Craig about their losses due to green seed, we were determined to help them as well.

Preventing green seed entirely would be the most beneficial solution for farmers, but we knew that was infeasible in our time frame. We determined that we could help them by creating software and hardware solutions that help with crop management and seed grading.

To learn about these software and hardware solutions, click on the buttons below.

Verifying need - Canolapalooza

Midway through the summer, we were lucky enough to be able to attend canolaPALOOZA. An annual event held in Lacombe, Alberta, canolaPALOOZA is the “agronomy event of the summer” where canola experts from all over the prairies come together to discuss all things canola. Everyone from farmers, agronomists, mycologists and even an undergraduate iGEM team from the University of Calgary descended on a lone canola field in Leduc to talk shop.

Many of our initial contacts, including Ward Toma and Dr. Barthet, were in attendance, in addition to many others. It was an excellent opportunity for us to propose our ideas to a wide cross-section of the canola industry, and get feedback on the commercial viability of our solutions. The event was extremely valuable because this is where we about the fungal infestations currently affecting canola crops in Alberta. A fortuitous meeting which would give us the inspiration to repurpose chlorophyll into an anti-fungal agent.

This event lead to a connection with the Canadian Grain Commission, who expressed their interest in the standard seed grading system. They informed us that there had been a similar project in the past that was successful, but got scrapped due to its cost. This inspired us to make our standardized grading machine as inexpensive as possible.

Having already decided to convert captured chlorophyll to pheophorbide, we then dedicated additional efforts to researching the affect of pheophorbide on fungal infestations affecting canola.

To learn about this process, click the button below.

With the need for our solutions verified, it was time for us to put shovels in the ground ( or bacteria on the agar) and begin designing yOIL. Our development would be agile and adaptable. Continually meeting with stakeholders and integrating feedback throughout the design process to ensure yOIL holistically embodies the needs of everyone involved in the canola oil pipeline.

The clay method is not reusable, environmentally friendly, or selective to chlorophyll, thus, we needed to come up with an improved solution. Proteins are organic and are made to be highly specific to their substrate, so we thought to design a system that utilized a protein to capture chlorophyll, but we weren’t confident as to which chlorophyll-binding protein to use, how it could be used in an oil environment, and what other considerations to be aware of.

To answer these questions, we spoke to protein bio-chemists, micro-biologists, plant biologists, and chemical engineers who gave us insight into how to design our system.

Chlorophyll cannot be removed from the acid-activated clay chlorophyll after it is bound; however, by using chlorophyll binding proteins the chlorophyll can be released after. In our initial discussions with Ward Toma, he suggested that repurposing chlorophyll could bring new revenue into the canola industry and mitigate some of the losses caused by green seed. Dallas Gade further confirmed that valuable byproducts could be useful to offset expensive input costs. Pheophorbide a is a natural catabolite of chlorophyll that has been investigated recently for its photosensitizing abilities in experimental anti-cancer (Xodo et al., 2012) and anti-fungal treatments (Liang et al.,2016). Seeing how lucrative the product is, we decided to genetically engineer part of the chlorophyll degradation pathway in E. coli to produce pheophorbide a.

Producing functional eukaryotic enzymes in bacteria can be a challenge, especially those involved in a specific pathway. We decided to talk to a microbial biochemistry and a plant biotechnologist about the feasibility of our idea.

Craig, Angela, and Ward, stressed two major hurdles farmers face when they produce and sell their seeds to oil processors: unpredictable weather and unstandardized seed grading practices. We turned to computation as a solution to address both problems. Current weather forecasts cannot predict weather 3-4 months into the future, preventing farmers from employing agronomic techniques that could save their crops. This drove us to design a long-term weather prediction system to give farmers the tools they need to make the right choices.

The current seed grading system involves a worker manually crushing a batch of 500 seeds and identifying each seed's colour based on a colour chip. The percentage of green seeds found denotes the grade of the batch, with a lower grade indicating higher green seed content. Higher green seed percentage means that a farmer's harvest is sold at a discount to grain elevators, effectively taking money out of their pockets. This process is very subjective, as it relies on the human eye to determine colour, and therefore grade. Farmers need a standardized system that will produce the same result every time, so they do not incur loss due to human subjectivity. We sought expert advice to build a machine that can solve this problem.

Attending CanolaPALOOZA allowed us to evaluate our project to see if we were effectively accomplishing our goal of helping the canola industry. Overall, we got very positive feedback on our projects, but we did learn about other problems the industry faces aside from green seed. Canola suffers from a fungal disease caused by Sclerotinia sclerotiorum leading to huge losses in crop yield annually (REFERENCE???) . This was interesting to us because our product, pheophorbide, is an anti-fungal agent that could be used to address this problem.

We decided to further investigate the effect S. sclerotiorum has on the canola industry (particularly on the farmers) and how we could use pheophorbide as a unique solution to combat it.

We are dedicated to improving our solutions to better serve the people in our community. We have made it our mission to involve our stakeholders and academic advisors in the ideation, design, and testing of our solutions.

To do this, we hosted a mid-summer faculty talk, inviting the experts we consultated with earlier in the project. Additionally, with our tools for the farmers, we met with the Canadian Grain Commission to perform testing of our standardized seed grading machine. Our weather prediction model is undergoing peer-review at Alberta Academic Review with the goal of being published and made available to the academic community for other researchers to improve.