Human Practices
PROJECT IDEATION
This product is meant to be used by the public. The main stakeholders using the product are farmers and suppliers. They will use this product to decrease the spread and help eradicate TSWV in their tomato plants as well as other plants that are affected by this virus. Other users could be homeowners. They could use this product in their own personal gardens so that they can reduce the use of pesticides in their plants. Grocery and gardening stores could sell this product so that it is more accessible to everyone in the community.
Integrated Human Practices
By tackling a critical agricultural issue and advocating for more ethical and sustainable farming methods, our project idea has a positive influence on society. Through stakeholder participation and ethical concerns, society in turn affects our project. Our project's goal, design, and laboratory experimentation options have all been influenced by ethical considerations regarding the environment's impact, food security, and pesticide usage. The direction and goals of our project have been shaped through stakeholder engagements with farmers and the general public, who have contributed insightful observations and input, such as a wider variety of viruses that affect tomatoes, as well as the affects the tomato market sees when an outbreak occurs.. This input was crucial to our work, ensuring that our project is responsive to problems in the real world and in line with society ideals and demands. It strengthens our resolve to advance ethical synthetic biology solutions for the good of both agriculture and society at large.
During the creation of our project, through communication with stakeholders, it was determined that many greenhouse tomato farmers in Ontario have not faced TSWV as an issue. However, other diseases such as Tomato Brown Rugose Fruit Virus have run rampant in recent years (M. Condoluci, personal communication, July 1, 2023). Due to this finding, our project direction was changed to find a system that we hope could be implemented against a variety of viruses through changing the sequence of interest. By creating a mini-cell production pathway within bacteria, we theorize that this system will allow for the implementation of RNAi against a variety of viruses, with each being targeted through its specific DNA sequence. In response to stakeholder feedback from farmers about the rising costs of pesticides and herbicides, our project aimed to produce a model that would allow for a single time spray, with the bacteria secreting minicells over its lifespan, allowing for farmers to save money by reducing the number of times crops must be sprayed.
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