Team:Osaka/Project animation

Hello, everyone!
We are iGEM from Osaka University, Japan!
Today, I want to introduce our project, “Continuous Greening Cycle.”
Here we go!

At first, we want to show you what happens
when we try to plant trees in the desert, in conventional way.
Here is the desert with a strong sun light.
At first, we just plant trees.

As usual, tree makes flower, and after that seeds will fallen from trees.
If everything go well, trees grows successfully.
However, if severe dry season comes, some threes unfortunately die and fall.
Even though rain season comes, water on the ground quickly vaporize and sprout from seeds can not survive.
If we just did planting in desert, this is the end of the project.

Now, I want to introduce our model, Continuous Greening Cycle!

At first, we plant trees as same as before.
The different point is that on the ground we also put our gene designed microbe and water-holding biopolymer.
Same as before, the trees make flowers and seeds will fallen from trees.
Then harsh dry season comes and trees die. However, this is not the end.
When it rains, our microbes starts to produce enzymes.
These enzyme has special ability to break the chemical bond in cellulose or wood fiber.
Each enzymes corporate each other to create sugar or otherwise called glucose.
Then our microbe will eat glucose and make water-absorbing biopolymer.

Since the microorganism will create more water holding biopolymer, the area with accumulated biopolymer will increase.

Even though another dry reason came and rain water vaporize, the area with the biopolymer still holds enough amount of water in ground. Thus seeds sprout.

Sprouts of plants absorb carbon dioxide and grow bigger and bigger.
If this cycle keeps going and spread more and more, all ground will be filled with enough water, and more trees will grow in the area.
By recovering vegetation in dry area, animals and human can live in there.

THANK YOU!!