Three Irish high-school girls won first place in the 2014 Google Science Fair for their project that speeds up seed growth with bacteria. They won for themselves $50,000 prize money for a project that took 3 years which interestingly began at their backyard garden.
The Google Science Fair is an international competition which challenges participants to employ science to improve the world.
After 11 months of experiments, the 16-year-olds—Ciara Judge, Émer Hickey, and Sophie Healy-Thow found that seeds treated with bacteria sprouted 50 percent faster than untreated seeds did. At harvest, the microbes increased barley and oats yields by as much as 70 percent.
The improved sprouting speed is instrumental to farmers in Ireland, where seeds can rot in the damp soil before sprouting, Hickey said. The trio hails from Cork County, the agricultural southern tip of the country.
But the project started in Hickey’s own backyard when she and her mom were gardening, she then noticed nodules on one of their pea plants, she took it to school and their teacher told them it was bacteria.”
The bacteria act as an early warning system for the plants, kickstarting growth. When the microbes sense the presence of compounds called flavonoids on plants, they begin to build nodules, swellings on roots that house bacteria able to convert atmospheric nitrogen into forms the plant can consume. The presence of the nodules then tells the plants it’s time to grow faster.
The trio’s experiment focused on three cereal crops found in diets around the world and used a strain of root microbes, Rhizobiumbacteria, that is ubiquitous in soils. But the buck doesn’t stop with those specific crops or bacteria.
“The great thing about our theory is that any crop that contains a flavonoid can trigger bacteria. It’ll work the same,” Judge said.
Since soil bacteria are naturally occurring, the teens emphasized that the process of inoculating seeds to increase plant growth would be feasible and inexpensive. In fact, similar commercial products are widely available.
The next steps are refining the process to foster the relationship between plants and bacteria more effectively in specific pairings.
The other finalists were aged from 14 to 17 years old and their projects included drones that mimic fruit flies and a bioreactor that cleans oil sands.
Other Google Science Fair winning ideas include robots inspired by fruit flies and bioreactors that clean up waste from the processing of oil sands.
Credit: National Geographic