Whats this?
And why is it posted in the terrorism board?
The full title of
this biochemical publication sounds even more boring:
Programmable Ligand Detection System in Plants through a Synthetic Signal Transduction PathwayOnly when we read the last senctence in the abstract of the "Methodology/Principal Findings" section and check the funders of the study this becomes *very* interesting for this field:
We describe assembly and function of a complete synthetic signal transduction pathway in plants that links input from computationally re-designed PBPs to a visual response. To sense extracellular ligands, we targeted the computational re-designed PBPs to the apoplast. PBPs bind the ligand and develop affinity for the extracellular domain of a chemotactic protein, Trg. We experimentally developed Trg fusions proteins, which bind the ligand-PBP complex, and activate intracellular PhoR, the HK cognate of PhoB. We then adapted Trg-PhoR fusions for function in plants showing that in the presence of an external ligand PhoB translocates to the nucleus and activates transcription. We linked this input to the de-greening circuit
Funding: This work was supported by grants to June Medford and Homme Hellinga from the United States Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA, Defense Science Office) and the Office of Naval Research (United States, ONR).
The whole paper is long and complicated to understand for laymen, but it boils down to this:
A terrorist enters a public place, like e.g. a train station or an airport, carrying a hidden bomb, the recent Moscow scenario. All of a sudden, the laurel bushes framing the gates go white as a sheet. That are the proteins inside the plants signalling that they’ve picked up the chemical trace of the hidden explosives.
Danger Room at Wired.com
sums it up like this:
It only took a small engineering nudge to deputize a plant’s natural, evolutionary self-defense mechanisms for threat detection. “Plants can’t run and hide,” says June Medford, the biologist who’s spent the last seven years figuring out how to deputize plants for counterterrorism. “If a bug comes by, it has to respond to it. And it already has the infrastructure to respond.”
That would be the “receptor” proteins in its DNA, which respond naturally to threatening stimuli. If a bug chews on a leaf, for instance, the plant releases a series of chemical signals called terpenoids — “a cavalry call,” Medford says, that thickens the leaf cuticle in defense.
Medford and her team designed a computer model to manipulate the receptors: Basically, the model instructs the protein to react when coming in contact with chemicals found in explosives or common air or water pollutants.
And the reaction would be the "link to the de-greening circuit" of the plant: The leaves turn white.
One big problem: It is probably not feasible to get the plants to react to ammonium nitrate. Ammonium nitrate is a widely used ingredient in homemade bombs in Afghanistan (also in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing), but: It is also one of the main ingredients of fertilizer, which is something plants need.
Eventually, Medford expects to bring the bomb-detecting plants to market through genetically modified seedlings. Whatever it costs, it’s got to be less than the $100.000 to $200.000 that a backscatter “junk scanner” can run.
Isn´t science wonderful?
Rattler
