Team:Nevada

Even though rice is a staple crop for half of the world's population, it lacks many of the essential nutrients necessary for healthy living. Additionally, vitamins and minerals cannot be added directly to rice, because they are lost or destroyed in the cooking process. Three specific nutrients that have been proven to be lacking in many people's diets to the detriment of their health are vitamin B12, thiamine, and the amino acid lysine.

In order to address these problems, we aim to engineer a protein supplement for rice that combines a starch-binding protein, a vitamin B12-binding protein, a thiamine-binding protein, and a lysine-rich protein. This will ensure that the nutrients we want to add will remain bound to the rice even through its preparation. To take this project one step further, we also aim to grow transgenic plants that express this chain of proteins. These plants will likely be a species of fast-growing model plant, but successful expression will demonstrate that eventually, transgenic nutrient-binding rice plants can be created.

In the process of creating this supplement, our team will also be improving a red fluorescent protein plasmid from a former iGEM team to serve as an expression vector. This improved part can be used by iGEM teams in the future to more easily and efficiently add genes of their choice directionally to a plasmid already designed to express RFP, which can be used to visibly check for expression.