Overall project

A technology blooming flowers on demand will bring a lot of fruits in the field of agriculture. We try to achieve this goal by our Flower Fairy E.coli,  which can produce Florigen. Florigen is a kind of  plant hormone, which is a peptide composed of one hundred and several tens amino acid. This small peptide hormone activates the transcription of some genes inducing blooming and is effective at low dose. The main purpose of our project is to make Florigen in E.coli and introduce this hormone into Plants!

We also execute sub goal. We study how a gene express when many promoters are inserted into the gene.

In order to achieve our goal, we devided our team into 3 groups――Florigen, Secretion, and Golden Gate Assembly.

Florigen

The florigen group aims to make Escherichia.coli express florigen that functions in plant cells correctly and to introduce it into plant cells.
Team:Kyoto/Florigen/Project

Secretion

The secretion group aims to make E.coli secrete protains without cell death. The group noticed a tat secretion system and decided to apply this system.
Team:Kyoto/Secretion/Project

Golden Gate Assembly

The secretion group aims to verify Golden Gate Assembly and use the assembly to study what will happen if we insert many promoters into a same part.
Team:Kyoto/GoldenGate/Project

Future Works

Main Theme

We noticed only flowering and florigen in this time but there are many many other plant hormones. We made translocation pathway from E.coli into plant cells, so we will be able to introduce plant hormones into plant cells if E.coli can make them. It means we can control plant growth in any stage through genetically engineered E.coli. In the future that is not so far, we will be able to meddle in plants' growth――germinating, elongation, flowering, and fructification. We human will finally accomplish a technology that control plants perfectly.

Moreover, R9 peptide functions not only plant cell. R9 peptide works on animal cell similarly. It means that we found a pathway into any kinds of cells. R9 peptide tag enables us to introduce proteins into any cells, so we will be able to controll all living cells using this technology.

Sub Theme