Albertans are a tough breed. We are a land of ranchers, roughnecks foresters and farmers. We have tilled the earth underneath unforgiving prairie winters and we have thrived while doing it. Rough hands toil the beautiful prairie landscapes painted yellow with budding canola.

We were inspired by the true grit of Albertan farmers who stand up to any challenge. This is iGEM Calgary's contribution. This is yOIL. Canola oil is one of Canada's leading exports. In 2017, the Canadian grown canola contributes $26.7 billion to the Canadian economy each year, including more than $250,000 jobs and $11.2 billion in wages (Canadian Canola Council). However, the Canadian canola industry faces a number of obstacles all stemming from the same root cause: Green Seed.

As canola seeds mature, enzymes break down the green chlorophyll pigment resulting in a mature brown seed. The "green seed problem" arises when canola plants are exposed to frost, drought or other inclement weather before maturation is complete. The chlorophyll degradation pathway is suspended and the seed remains green.

What is so bad about that?

The farmers we spoke to lamented the fact that their green canola seeds have to be sold at a discount. Farmers like Craig Shand who are forced to go from $10 per bushel to $7 per bushel on his hard earned harvest. The sweat of his brow is leaking back into the earth through the hole in his pocket. It doesn't stop there though.

Downstream, canola oil crushers need to spend more money to remove chlorophyll from the canola oil. This process is costly, as pointed out by Dallas Gade, Richardson Oilseed's Engineering Manager, and oil is lost in the process. As if that's not enough, the chlorophyll is

The green seed problem is a leech on the canola industry, stealing money out of the hands of farmers and oil producers. With the same grit and dedication of our hard working Albertan farmers, we developed yOIL. yOIL is a multi-faceted attack on the green seed problem.

First, we developed a system utilizing water-soluble-chlorophyll binding proteins emulsified in water droplets to remove chlorophyll molecules from oil. The captured chlorophyll will then be repurposed into pheophorbide, an experimental photosensitizer with potential as an anti-fungal agent.

Second, we wanted to address ambiguities that arise when farmers take their seeds to be graded. The process is as follows. Farmers take a sampling of 500-1000 seeds to a grain elevator and those seeds are individually compared to a color card. This process is slow, tedious and highly subjective as the seeds are evaluated by the naked human eye. Our team developed a standardized seed grading platform, lovingly called "Mean Green Machine" which will automate the grading process in its entirety. We took the Mean Green Machine (MGM) to The Canadian Grain Commission where they gave us vital feedback to help move MGM closer to a fully-implemented product.

The last factor affecting green seed is by far the most difficult: the weather. Inclement weather is what causes green seed, and knowing the weather lets farmers make crucial decisions regarding their crop. If they know an early frost is coming, they can take the appropriate measures to make sure their harvest does not go to waste. We cannot control the weather, but we can create tools to predict it. After all, everyone could use more Sunny Days. Following a conversation with Ward Toma, the General Manager of the Alberta Canola Producers Commission, we learnt that while the forecast is great for short-term weather prediction, it does not predict the weather far enough ahead to be useful to farmers. Sunny Days is a weather predictive algorithm based on Recurrent Neural Networks and Principal Component Analysis which was able to predict the weather 180 days into the future with mean absolute error of 2.0 degrees.

https://www.canolacouncil.org/markets-stats/industry-overview/