Team:St Pauls London

We are Bipeople, a biological honor society in Cheongshim International Academy, South Korea. Dahee Chung is the leader of the team and the other members are Leeseok Kim, SeungA Cho, Yunji Seo, Jushin Oh, and Philjae Chang. In Geol Choi is the main instructor of our team and the advisor is Kyoungwoo Jang. Every Friday, our team joins up in order to study synthetic biology. Especially interested in desertification, our team is now finding ways to prevent this problem with synthetic biology.

Desertification is a significant environmental global issue indeed. Desertification is the most common type of land degradation in which a relatively dry land becomes sterile, losing fertility. Approximately 12 million hectare of land, where 20 million tons of grain could be grown, is becoming deserted in a 23 hectare per minute. Desertification is mostly due to the overgrazing, farming of average land, destruction of plants in dry regions, or incorrect irrigation in arid region. The effect of desertification is not negligible, affecting the crucial part of humanity. Arrangement of desertification is accelerating annually and it used to cause various problems. For instance, it causes a destruction of plants in dry regions and block irrigation in arid regions. It also arouses a low cultivation of vegetable, deforestation,overgrazing, and changes in population density. Therefore, fair amounts of groups are attempting to stop these problems, aiming to not aggravate them.United Nations is one of the representative groups that are concerned with the desertification, suggesting solutions such as planting, resting the marginal land by reducing or removing livestock, and creating artificial climates to control the irrigation in arid regions. Using several types of bacteria, we propose prevention of desertification in complicated ways. We are planning to use basilius pasteurii and type of free nitrogen bacteria to settle the environment that plants could live. First, basilius pasteurii is a bacterium with the ability to precipitate calcite and solidify sand given a calcium source and urea, through the process of microbiologically induced calcite precipitation or biological cementation. Also, free nitrogen fixation bacteria are able to utilize a variety of inorganic and organic sources of combined nitrogen, like nitrate, nitrite, ammonium, urea,or some amino acids. They could make the environment which new plants in desert could continue their lives in the new-made environment.