Overview

From the very beginning, we have engaged the experts who have a deep understanding of late blight disease in order to ensure that our project is addressing a genuine need as define by those who know best. Who are these experts? They are farmers, professor, researcher and some government officials who deal with the late blight disease or plant the potatoes every single day. This also meant that patients were acutely aware of the limitations of the project, which we believe reduces the chance of giving false hope to people with a very serious need.

Farmer

Concept

FYVE protein domain is well conserved PI3P binding domain in various organisms with only 141 amino acids. FYVE protein domain originally existed in EEA1 and Hrs proteins in human and mouse, respectively. However, EEA1 and Hrs protein are too large and may take long time for the plant to degrade, we then decided to extract the protein domain from Hrs protein. On the other hand, monomeric FYVE has far lower affinity to PI3P than Hrs and it is not so stable. Therefore, we decided to construct a dimeric FYVE which has a higher affinity and is much more stable than monomeric FYVE.

Varieties

1. Kennebec

Kennebec is originally bred by the United States Department of Agriculture, and it is the most common processed potatoes in the United States and Canada. Kennebec can be used in making French fries, potato chips, while TainungNO.1 cannot. Kennebec has shallow and evenly distributed tuberogemmas, thin and yellow skin, green sprout, oval-shaped tubers and big and light leave color. Kennebec’s tubers size is big, which meets to the eating habit of Taiwanese. However, Kennebec can be easily infected by potato virus and potato late blight, causing to the crop failure. Recently, the best preventive method is to adopt healthy seed potatoes for planting, and it needs to renew the seed potatoes every year. It takes 80 to 100 days to harvest, which means that it has a short planting time. It can crop about 25 to 30 tons of potatoes per hectare. Owing to the short cultivation period, it will not affect farmers in Taiwan to plant a period of rice in summer. Besides, the cultivation type of Kennebec is most familiar to the farmers. Due to the above reasons, farmers prefer to plant Kennebec .

2. TainungNO.1

TainungNO.1 is bred by Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute. It has light yellow and oval-shaped tubers, smooth skin, purple sprout, dark green and glossy leaves and smaller stem and leaves comparing with Kennebec. It has strong resistant to late blight and potato virus, but it is susceptible to common scab. It also has very weak thermo tolerance, so it is not available to be early planted. The best sowing time in Taiwan is during the bottom of October to the top of November. The storage of TainungNO.1 will cause a big question, which is the accumulation of reducing reductive sugar. What is the matter？ When it comes to processing, the reducing sugar will react with asparagine and produce acrylamide under the high temperature of roasting or frying. (a)Acrylamide is a chemical compound that studies have linked to the formation of cancer in animals, and the FDA has encouraged people to cut back on foods that contain the substance. (a)It takes about 120 days to harvest and it can crop about 32 to 39 tons of potatoes per hectare. Because it is not a good source of processed potatoes and the farmers do not adapt to the cultivation mode of TainungNO.1, including irrigation, fertilization, and medication and so on, the planting area and the production of TainungNO.1 are still at low percentage.

Growth and harvest of tainungNO.1:

1. preparation:
   
   1. decide species
   2. selecting seed potatoes
   3. avoid cropping obstacles
   4. organize farm land into furrow
   5. sprouting
2. planting period:
   
   1. the best planting time
   2. the amount of seed potatoes used
   3. the splicing size of seed potatoes
   4. sterilization
   5. control the distance between seed potatoes
   6. weeds management
3. growing period:
   
   1. plow and recover the soil
   2. remove the weeds
   3. add fertilizer
   4. moisture and pest management
   5. remove the infected plant
4. harvest and storage:
   
   1. grade the potatoes
   2. remove the weeds
   3. add fertilizer
   4. moisture and pest management
   5. fridge in 4∘C.

Economic

To the farmers, in addition to the late blight disease, the marketing question is also an important issue. We need to prove that our improved potatoes are really benefit to the farmers.

Marketing situation

Potatoes selling are separated into two parts. One is for fresh potatoes, and the other is for processed potatoes. The latter one accounts for the most part of potatoes. Therefore, we need to find out how the potatoes are processed.
The potatoes production produced in Taiwan has over eighty percent of market share, and the output value is about six hundred million NT dollars. Additionally, there are three potatoes’ factory, which output about three thousand tons of potato production and three hundred million NT dollars. There are the backbones of potatoes’ industry.The price of the potatoes is about 25 NT dollars per kilogram on average. It will reach the climax in November and go to the bottom in February.

The planting period is about 90 to 120 days, and it can store in the fridge under 4 degrees of Celsius condition after harvest. It can store up to two years, and the farmers can sale the potatoes successively during this period. Therefore, selling the potatoes is a program of marketing. In terms of the period of the planting time, we can simply separate the stage of the marketing situation into three parts. There are planting and growing phase, harvest phase and storage phase.

• Planting and growing phase: It is about August to November, including some preparation of planting. In this phase, the potatoes produced in the previous years are almost sold out, and the fresh potatoes haven’t cropped. Therefore, it reaches the highest price in this phase.
  
  
• Harvest period: It is about December to March the year afterwards. In this phase, the potatoes in the first period are successively cropped. Those potatoes will influx in the market, so the price is decreasing.
  
  
• Storage phase: It is about April to August. In this phase, in addition to supply the demand of the market, the most parts of potatoes will be stored to be frozen vegetables in order to balance the price of vegetables responding to the insufficient supply of summer vegetables when we meets some typhoon or other disaster. The price in this phase will slightly increase back to the average.

Conclusion

Our objective is to compare the traditional way with our project, intending to quantize the benefit that we can bring to the farmers. So we need to help the farmers to calculate the costs of planting, the income and the net profit. We will need to check out the current market situation and the output value to caculate.

Education

For education, we make lots of effort on promoting the central idea of iGEM and also how our project are going to affect our society.We go to school from primary to senior high (and of course university) to tell them how we can use the biobricks to construct a new sequence. We even make a picture to let younger kids understand what we have done.Furthurmore We published some article on magazines to educate the public about potatoes issues and iGEM.

Government and non-government

Non government organization/ public

We contact with lots of non government organization not only for propagating our project but also drawing support from their resources which transfers to make our project realize.

We participate a lot of forum in order to tell others about pesticide reducing, potatoes species improvement, how to defense against late blight, gene modify technology and so on. We exchange our idea with the participants and also make some adjustment from their opinion. We tried to exert our influence toward farmers, government, researchers, and the public. We hope that our project can practically carry out and make good use.

Government

We have visited Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan, Food and Drug Administration , Taiwan Seed Improvement and Propagation Station and Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute. From We learn about the structure of potatoes’ production.

The Law

Owing to our prevention part invovled in GMO planting, we need to check out the regulation of GMO to make sure that our project is not illegal. Also, we are going to advocate some juristic modification and promotion.

For agriculture, we care about GMO planting issue. In Taiwan, there are two standards to check GMO planting. One is called “genetic characteristics investigation”, which means whenever we transplant a part of gene sequence, we need to make sure that this part of gene sequence will constantly express generations.

The other one is called “biosafety assessment”, which means we need to detect the modification of the environment whether it changes or not during the GMO planting period.

For environment, because we are going to spread our deffensin into the farm, so we need to check out the environmental regulations. On one hand, we will not break the law. On the other hand, we can learn how the recent regulations restrict the pesticide and make some comparison with our deffensin to show how we will impact on environment on juristic aspect.

For food safety, our ultimate goal is to supply our potatoes into markets and let people have a different choice to eat healthy, safe and cheaper potatoes. Therefore, we need to learn the regulations of GMO food and how they are inspected. In Taiwan, GMO food regulations are still under constructed, so we also devote to share our opinions with the government.