What if plants could become beacons that tap in and display the signaling happening within their mycorrhizal networks or taste the soil the way a catfish tastes its environment and share its discoveries with farmers or the sensor networks made up of cube-sats scanning the Earth each day to sense planetary health?
What if monks of the celibate celestial order of the ageless cephalopods could remember how to grow sea silk byssus from their molluscan cousins—like the Pinna Nobilis—and could walk the cliffs and snowy tundras along the sea keeping warm, weaving tethered bridges in their wakes and contributing their silk to the creation of timeless arcologies woven into being by their ceaseless army of arms?
What if tanks of photosynthetic purple bacteria could be combined with magnetotactic bacteria, an antenna and a handful of other oscillating and switching cellular components to become self-reporting webs of RFID-coli signaling their health, or even when various proteins are being expressed?
As I explored this week’s topic it forced me to get very granular. Why would I want to read a given DNA? Why would I want to write one? What edits might I want to make to what organisms for what ends? It led me down any number of wormholes that I fear I may not recover from in this lifetime and not surprisingly forced me to see all the ways scientists have explored so far. Any time I thought I was on to something novel I succumbed to the classic research problem of realizing that so many had been there before, or a given idea I had was far more complex and layered than it might seem from a simple description of the concept. It also made me pull out a method or two for creative collisions like generative matrixes and design mad-libs to explore more creatively.
1) Planet Plant DNA Read.
(i) What DNA would you want to sequence (e.g., read) and why?
I’d like to read the 13 different cover crops found to be most successful at fixing nutrients and carbon in the soil, creating soil organic matter, reducing pathogens, or fighting weeds. The first would be the sunflower as its good at aerating the soil, creating organic matter, and faces a common direction (east) when fully grown due to heliotropism. The sunflower’s predictable orientation, rich coloration, mathematically “digital” display surface, deep (2-5 feet) root system and phytoremediation ability makes them ideal as the first species of planet plants.
(ii)What technology or technologies would you use to perform this sequencing and why?
The sunflower has 17 pairs of chromosomes and has somewhere between 2.9 and 3.5 billion base pairs. I’d be particularly interested in the genes that control color in the flower (both visible and infrared) as well as those that facilitate the uptake of metals and other elements found in the soil. Given its large size I would use RAD-sequencing (restriction site associated DNA sequencing) with an illumina multiplexing system to deal with duplicates and repetitive sequences and lower the cost of producing the sequence.
(2) RFID-coli DNA Write.
(i) What DNA would you want to synthesize (e.g., write) and why?
To create RFID-coli we’ll need to synthesize the genes responsible for organelle development within magnetotactic bacteria that produces magnetite and other metal sequestering functions. There are model systems like δ-Proteobacterium RS-1 that have genes mamE and mamO as well as mamAB and mamGFDC that would be a first starting point for synthesis as they seem to be common sites responsible in some way for organelle formation.