Applied Design

How to use our system as a whole?

After knowing the basic ideas and designs of our work, you may feel the whole system is very huge. At the same time you may doubt the possibility to apply such a complicated system into real life. Don’t worry, we will illustrate the feasibility to do this application in this page.

Our Tentative Plan

Based on the work we have done, we came up with this tentative plan of general steps to apply our system in practice which may be come true in several years.

Step1. Sensors

Place our host devices and slave devices on fixed points in the fields according to the economical principle. This devices will collect the data and make judgements based on the stored training set and send the results to users in time as we mentioned in Hardware page.

Step2. Signal transduction

DAPG will be produced by our engineered E.coli and then added into our devices in advance as a signal molecule as we introduced in the Chemical Signal Transduction page. And the medium wave emission device will be carried on uncrewed vehicles and then it will work as we designed in Hardware page.

Step3. Guardians on posts

Our guardians T.atroviride will be pre-inoculated into the soil by a non-pollution way: We inoculated the guardians into a wheat culture medium and cultured it on a shaker for several days. After that, we provided this medium to users(like a normal farmer), what he needs to do is that mix it with some water and spray it into the fields after soaking it for a night. The guardians then successfully inoculated into the farm.

Fig.1 The wheat culture medium we used to pre-inoculate T.artoviride before applied in the farms

Your crops are under your real time monitoring and guarded from T.atroviride now!

Difficulties we need to overcome

There are still some important difficulties we have to overcome to achieve the above plan:

• The effective monitoring range of the devices need to be measured to determine the suitable positions to put devices.
• The medium wave emission device is still unfinished. The power of the coil seems too low and we need further test the heat effect induced by medium waves.
• The Signal transduction system need to be completely verified further in T.atroviride instead of using yeasts to substitute.
• The inoculating method need to be improved to fit the realistic condition.

We believe this tentative plan can be achieved soon based on our existing results.

Our Advantages

Combined with the three domains including synthetic biology, computer science, and engineering, our project had create a new direction in applying biocontrol in agriculture, and it has its own advantage:

• Ecological: We use Trichoderma atroviride, a common biocontrol agent, as our chassis to improve the soil condition, avoiding to disrupt the soil ecosystem as general chemical way did.
• Sensitive: The VOC sensor. Different with general sensors, we provided a hardware which can distinguish whether the plants were healthy or invaded. It solved the delay and limitation problem for traditional sensors.
• Interactive: We designed a whole system from sensing to solving the pathogens, and the relevant information can be transferred to both users and T.atroviride, thus making the users know the condition of his plants and biocontrol agents well.
• Strong portability: Our system can be used to solve many different problems in agriculture since the sensors’ mechanism is based on machine learning and the effectors can be changed by different genes.

Future Plan

Our future plan is to combine the electronic hardware part with agriculture irrigation system. Although our prototype device is a little bit unwieldy, we expect to miniaturize it and integrate it into the nozzle of the irrigating network. The wires that supply power and transduce signal can be bound to the water supply pipe system and forms a collateral network. In this way our device can be deployed in farmland at the time when the irrigation system is set up. Through the gridded irrigation system the device can be set up as gridding cells, which would be helpful to comprehensively gather information and react to the abnormal condition in time.

Fig.2 The illustration for the ideas of applying our system with the irrigation system in the farm