They went with frogs… and defeated teams from around the world

Twenty-one young people succeeded with a project to improve the cultivation of duckweed and turn it into a source of protein for livestock. In its twenty-year history, this is the first victory for a Czech-Slovak team in the  iGEM global competition.

For more than a year, the group called iGEM Brno from Masaryk University and the Brno University of Technology devoted themselves not only to finding better ways to grow the aquatic plant duckweed, commonly known as frogbit. It is the smallest and fastest-growing aquatic plant in the world, which also tolerates much higher concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus than other plants. The team sought to utilise and improve all of this in order to explore and demonstrate ways in which duckweed can help farmers feed their animals and reduce nitrogen emissions.

Duckweed contains the same amount of protein as soybeans, but can produce up to three times more biomass in the same area and in the same time. However, growing duckweed would require fundamental changes in farm infrastructure, which poses a risk to farmers. Therefore, in order for them to have a reason to accept this plant, it is necessary to further increase its productivity – to turn it into a crop. “It´s a process that humanity is familiar with – all the crops we commonly consume today have undergone thousands of years of breeding,” explained Miroslav Rosputinský, one of the founding members of the team.

However, it is not possible to wait that long for a new crop, so the team focused on ways to speed up the process. On the one hand, it set out to find a technical solution for growing duckweed more efficiently, but above all it focused on the possibility of genetically modifying the plant to produce more biomass.

Research tools

After consulting with scientists from around the world, the team ultimately reconsidered its original goal of genetically modifying duckweed to produce more biomass. However, it succeeded in creating a set of tools that significantly simplify the study of duckweed for other scientists. This earned them the grand prize in the global competition.

They won the Grand Prize in the category of most experienced teams, even though there was not a single doctoral student among the members of iGEM Brno, leaving behind competitors from the world's best universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. The team's success was also underscored by three other special awards: Best Agriculture Project, Best Plant Synthetic Biology and Best Presentation.

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“We have made significant progress in the possibilities of genetic modification of duckweed. At the competition finals, which took place at the end of October in Paris, we presented a new transformation protocol that shortens the process of modifying the duckweed genome from the previous five months to one month. To achieve this progress, we used synthetic biology tools and succeeded in preparing two plasmids, i.e. DNA molecules naturally occurring in bacteria, which we can use to modify the duckweed genome and thus change its properties,” said Rosputinský of the team's results, adding that the success of genetic modification is currently only partial, meaning that the mutation does not occur in all cells of the modified plant.

The iGEM Brno team also succeeded in developing an autonomous vertical modular cultivation system controlled via a mobile application. They also have a predictive model that helps design experiments according to the researchers' intentions. Everything the team has managed to create can currently be used primarily by scientists for further research on duckweed and experiments with it.

An intense month before the finals

The students worked on the project for about a year, and before the Grand Jamboree in Paris, which was attended by five thousand people, they had what was probably their most intense month. They had to prepare to present their work to the judges. They had five minutes to present the project and then twenty minutes to answer questions that the evaluators had prepared based on the website that the team had created for the project.

“Most of our preparation during October focused on this questioning phase. We anticipated what the judges might ask, prepared answers, decided who from the team would answer specific types of questions, and practised perfecting our answers,” Rosputinský explained, adding that their mentors also arranged meetings with scientists and research group leaders at MU, who asked them questions and advised them on how to improve their answers and presentation.

The teachers were also accommodating and allowed the students to make up for missed exercises and other obligations so that the team could fully concentrate on preparing for the finals.
The finals lasted several days, and the Brno team was fortunate to have their presentation in front of a six-member jury on the first day, followed by a two-day presentation at their stand. “We had our cultivator there, which our colleagues from BUT brought to the venue by car. It attracted a lot of people to the stand,” noted Rosputinský.

After the presentation of all the projects, the organisers announced the teams that had advanced to the finals. After the finalists were announced, the iGEM Brno group had one more round before the jury. “They called us into a room where 417 judges were sitting, which was the vast majority of all the competition evaluators, and we had to spend ten minutes answering the questions they had prepared for us. You can imagine how nervous you feel when you're standing in front of four hundred people in green jackets, which is how the judges distinguished themselves,” said another team member, Klára Pěchoučková, describing the conclusion of the finals.

Grand Prize Winners

This year, over 400 teams from more than 60 countries around the world participated in the iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) competition. Most of them received bronze, silver or gold medals. These are awarded for fulfilling specific conditions during the course of the project: for creating a wiki page, submitting a presentation or for engineering success.

Three main prizes are awarded, one in each category for secondary school students, university students and so-called overgraduates, which includes teams whose members are over 23 years of age. The Czech-Slovak team from Brno thus achieved the highest goal in a competition featuring teams from the world's best universities.

“Participating in this competition certainly gave us all a wealth of experience that we would not have had the chance to gain elsewhere. We got to experience science from all angles, from the initial idea to planning, fundraising, networking and presentation. Okřehek will certainly be the subject of several final theses, and winning the iGEM competition will definitely help open doors to prestigious universities or top research teams in our CVs,” Pěchoučková says.

Although most members of the winning team are ending their involvement with the project, some will continue to work on its development. “We would like to increase the success rate of how many plant cells the inserted genetic mutation is written into. We are currently trying this by changing the external conditions for growing duckweed,” Rosputinský added.