Introducing the Stony Brook University 2020 iGEM Team!

Hello, we are the Stony Brook University iGEM team! This year's team includes 14 team members, including 7 rising sophomores, 4 rising juniors, and 3 rising seniors. Our team has students from over 8 different majors, allowing each member to be unique and bring so much variety with them!

We are proud to announce that we will be focusing our project on mitigating the effects of gene flow in the agriculture sector! We are all so excited to further our project, connect with different people, help the community, and leave a lasting impact on iGEM history this summer! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to message us, we are more than happy to listen to your questions and thoughts.

Be a part of our journey by following & liking us on Facebook (@ iGEM at Stony Brook) and following us on Instagram (@igem.stonybrook). Also, be sure to support our team by voting for us in the Molecular Cloud Sponsorship: molecularcloud.org. We greatly appreciate all of your support!

For a number of decades, the agricultural industry has sought to enact the benefits of genetically modified (GM) crops to improve crop yields and mitigate crop losses due to pests and pathogens. For example, GM crops can decrease pesticide usage in large-scale agricultural production and uptake nutrients more efficiently than their unmodified counterparts. While genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have revolutionized the current worldview of agriculture, farmers and scientists alike have raised concern over their negative effects on the environment. Particularly, gene flow—the transfer of genetic variation from one population to another—from cultivated crops to weedy or wild crops is a potential risk of commercializing GM crops. Gene flow can decrease genetic variation within a population by modifying allele frequencies. If the rate of gene flow is high enough, GM crops can outcompete their wild-type (WT) counterparts, leading to decreased biodiversity. 

There are many prospective solutions to combat gene flow and its impact on agriculture. One is vertical farming, which involves cultivating produce in vertically arranged layers. It has paved the way for sustainable agricultural practices, allowing farmers and agricultural industries greater control over factors like soil and water use, and gas emission levels. With hydroponic farming methods, farmers can introduce oxygen and other nutrients to plant roots, allowing for more growth cycles in less time. Traditional farming methods rely on nitrogen-containing fertilizers, which increase the amount of atmospheric nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Growing produce in an indoor environment gives farmers more control over their crops and prevents intervention from animals, pathogens, and even other plants—reducing gene flow. Indoor vertical farming is an effective strategy for promoting conservation and minimizing gene flow that could occur in conventional farming methods. However, this strategy lacks control at the level of an individual organism if it were to be inadvertently introduced to the environment.

Using an optogenetic approach, we plan to modify plants so they could grow under red and blue light, but die when exposed to natural light. With the indoor farming industry projected to reach upwards of 22 billion USD by 2026, controlling plant growth would become advantageous. Indoor farmers would be at greater liberty to modify their crops without worrying about the deleterious effects of gene flow.

Currently, we are reaching out to farmers, especially indoor farmers, to hear what they think about our novel approach. We are also meeting with our previous high school teachers and our school organizations (e.g CSTEP, a program to promote underrepresented minorities in STEM) to teach incoming freshmen on the importance of synthetic biology and genetic engineering. One of the most exciting things we are organizing is collaborations with other iGEM teams! Communicating with iGEM teams from all around the world, we are amazed at the creative ways undergraduate students like us integrate synthetic biology to solve real world problems

We are so excited for what this summer holds for us!