Title: Thailand RIS: Powering up Plant Defenses

Description: Thailand is heavily dependent on its agricultural industry. An issue that Thai farmers often face is the degradation of their crop harvest as a result of extreme environmental conditions that cause stress to their plants—posing a threat to their livelihoods and causing adverse economic consequences. The Thailand-RIS team aims to alleviate this issue by modifying the Glutamate-cysteine ligase (GCL) gene which plays an important role in stress response via regulating the production of Glutathione (GSH). Thailand-RIS seeks to remove Chloroplast transit peptides and replace them with a Mitochondrial transit sequence in order to bypass the transport process and enable the production of GSH directly in the mitochondria. Since the mitochondria are the primary site of reactive oxygen species production, this modification holds the potential to make the production of GCL more efficient and abundant; thus increasing a plant’s resistance to stress. Imagine cooking food in the kitchen and the bedroom, would it be faster for you to cook a meal in the kitchen or the bedroom? Just like how it would be more efficient to cook in the kitchen since the ingredients and tools are already available, it is faster for plants to produce GSH directly in the Mitochondria (done through changing GCL’s transit peptide from a cytosol one to a Mitochondrial one) since oxidative reductive species helps the production of GSH.

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Title: Bacteria-Battling Bombolitin

Description: Ralstonia causes bacterial wilt in Solanaceous crops worldwide. In an attempt to combat this problem, farmers use pesticides. However, pesticides result in detrimental effects on the enviro...

Title: Mirifica Magnifica: Pathway to Puerarin

Description: The Thailand-RIS team aims to make neurodegenerative disease treatments more accessible by developing a sustainable method for producing puerarin, a neuroprotective supplement. Currently, puerarin production is costly and labor-intensive. The team wants to make puerarin production more cost-effective by transferring the isoflavonoid pathway responsible for producing puerarin from its native plant, Pueraria lobata v. mirifica, to a more sustainable and less resource intensive plant like Nicotiana benthamiana.

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Title: Powering Up Plant Defense

Description: A growing issue that farmers are facing is the degradation of their crop harvest as a result of extreme environmental conditions that cause stress to their plants posing a threat to their livelihoods and causing adverse economic consequences. Team Thailand-RIS aims to alleviate this issue by modifying the Glutamate-cysteine ligase (GCL) gene which plays an important role in stress response via regulating the production of Glutathione (GSH). Thailand-RIS seeks to remove chloroplast transit peptides and replace them with a mitochondrial transit sequence in order to bypass the transport process and enable the production of GSH directly in the mitochondria. After testing, this modification has no impact towards the growth of the plant, and solely affects stress responses. Plant s which were subject to heat and saline stress did not show observable phenotype changes. However, plants which were subject to drought stress showed a 48 hour delay in wilting.

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