Lumifert

Synthetic fertilizers have become essential to modern agriculture because they are effective, scalable, and capable of supporting the food demands of a growing global population. However, their production is energy intensive and significantly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Conventional fertilizers also release nutrients too quicky, causing excess nitrogen and phosphorus to wash into surrounding ecosystems before crops can fully absorb them. This disrupts ecosystems and is as a significant source of financial loss for farmers.
iGEM Guelph is addressing these problems with Lumifert, a bioengineered duckweed-based fertilizer. Lumifert uses duckweed and engineered microorganisms to produce and store the key nutrients for plant growth: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Using genetic engineering, we can make nutrient production controlled by exposure to different wavelengths of light, allowing us to customize the engineered duckweed’s nutritional content to meet individual consumers' needs. The duckweed biomass allows targeted nutrients to release slowly as the plant material breaks down, all the while helping to reduce fertilizer runoff and its harmful environmental impact.