We want to live in Mars
Abstract
The earth is the cradle of mankind, but mankind will not live in the cradle forever.
Mars is a potential destination for human migration. However, future explorers will face significant challenges, including the lack of natural food resources and oxygen, toxic and poor soil for crop production, and limited synbio toolkit.
We proposed solutions across four key areas inspired by a series of human practices. First, to provide sustainable nutrition, we aim to co-culture engineered yeast and cyanobacteria to produce essential compounds such as lycopene, nerol, and limonene. Second, to convert Martian soil into arable land, we isolated nitrogen-fixing bacteria and used directed evolution to enhance bacteria’s resistance to Martian toxins.
Third, we introduced updates to our TTTT system, released in 2023, which now reduces plant transformation time by up to 50%, encouraging more iGEM participants to engage in plant synthetic biology. Finally, as a creative endeavor, we applied DNA data storage to archive significant records of Earth's biodiversity and culture for future generations
We were inspired by others and iGEM community
We really harvested a lot by following the guidance of human practice from iGEM. It not only polished our project, but gave us a deeper understanding of the distance between problems and reality, and the connection between individuals and communities.
Engineering Human Practices
We decided to encourage more iGEMers to engage in
Accelerated the DBTL cycle of chassis in plant synthetic biology will encourage more iGEMer to engage in, and this will educate a large population for further plant synbio.
Plant