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About Our Project
The 2015 NYMU iGEM team presents a potato defense system, an effective system that can be easily implemented by potato farmers all over the world. This system is made up of three parts: protection, detection, and cure.
Our system consists of potatoes that is resistant to Phytophthora infestans, a fungus-like pathogen that causes potato late blight, by constructing a competitive inhibitor that can prevent the effector protein secreted by P. infestans from entering the potato cell. In case that the potato we genetically modified can’t fend off the P. infestans, we designed a soil based microbial fuel cell (SMFC) with engineered bacteria on the anode of the SMFC that can detect whether the potato tuber is infected or not. If the potato is infected and detected by our SMFC, we will spread defensin obtained from maca. The defensin can weaken and inhibit the growth of P. infestans while doing no harm to the environment since it doesn’t contain heavy metal like most fungicide.
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