Using Gene Editing To Provide Water For Everyone
3%
This is the amount of water on earth that is freshwater.
Of that 3%, only 1.2% is drinkable.
That leaves us with the issue of not enough water for everyone.
Water is something that we use and waste every day.
When you wake up in the morning and you go brush your teeth.
You use about 5 gallons of water if you leave the water running while brushing your teeth.
When you go, put your clothes in the washing machine.
Your washing machine uses about 15–30 gallons of water per cycle.
When you grab a handful of almonds for a snack.
1.3 gallons of water are used to produce 1 almond and 20–30 gallons of water for a handful.
When you take a shower.
A 10-minute shower uses about 20 gallons of water
When you grab a burger for lunch.
⅓ of a pound burger requires 660 gallons of water.
This is not even half of the things someone may do in a day that uses water. Yet it is already over 730 gallons of water used and this is just one person.
Access to water is recognized as a human right by the united nations.
Yet more than 884 million people do not have safe water to drink.
This is a major problem that needs to be solved.
Now you may be wondering how we can fix this.
Well, first we have to look at part of the root of the problem.
Agriculture
Globally 70% of freshwater is used for agriculture.
So how can we lower the use of water in agriculture?
I started wondering if we could water plants with seawater.
As 97% of the world water is seawater and is not being used.
Now, the answer to this question may seem pretty obvious as the seawater will just kill the plants. Well, this is true.
But what if there was more to the story. What if we could take plants and change them so they could grow in seawater.
4 words
Gene editing + Halophytes + Crispr-Cas9
“Gene editing is genetic engineering and occurs when DNA is deleted, inserted, modified or replaced in the genome of any living organism.”
“Halophytes is a salt-tolerant plant that grows in soil or waters of high salinity, coming into contact with saline water through its roots or by salt sprays, it grows in saline semi-deserts, mangrove swamps, marshes and sloughs and seashores.”
“CRISPR-Cas9-is a new technology and is an extremely specific way of finding DNA in a cell. And using CRISPR to edit it. How crisper works are when the target DNA is located Cas9 which is one of the enzymes made by the CRISPR. This Cas9 connects to the DNA and cuts is a can then turn off the targeted gene. By modifying the Cas9 scientist can activate or add in genes instead of just cutting the DNA.
IDEA
By using genetic engineering specifically CRISPR-CAS 9. We can take out the gene in the plant Halophytes that allows it to grow in saltwater. And then using CRISPR-CAS 9 to place that gene into the DNA of other plants. This would then allow us to grow things light carrots, potatoes tomatos e.t.c all with saltwater. Which will in turn result in us saving on all of the water we would have used on agriculture and then being able to give more people access to fresh water.
You may be thinking that this is simply not possible. But it actually is and it has been done before, just never to this scale and using the plant Halophytes.
Arigiesia is a company that is trying to grow rice in the ocean and they are using CRISPR-CAS 9 to do so. Their approach is a bit different and instead of inserting genes from other species in the rice, they have found the genes that control the salt expulsion and DNA protection and trying to strengthen those genes.
Here is an image of some of the genetically modified rice that they have been testing on.
Another company had also gene-edited rice using genes from mangrove trees. It resulted in the rice being able to tolerate salt concentrations of 12–15 grams per litre.
My Tests
I decided to test out growing plants with saltwater. So I took 3 carrot plants. To plant 1 I watered it with just freshwater, to plant 2 I watered it 10% saltwater and to plant 3 I watered it with 15% saltwater.
Here is an image from day 1 of the tests.
And here is an image from day 7 of the tests.
All 3 of these plants are practically the same height. If anything the plant 3 is actually a little taller than plant 1 which was just watered with fresh water. Pretty crazy right! Imagine the potential if we did use gene editing to allow them to take in even more saltwater.
If we give this idea a try we could end up being able to provide fresh drinkable water for everyone. What do you think?
Here are some additional resources that I recommend checking out if you want to learn more.
-https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/chart-globally-70-freshwater-used-agriculture
-https://www.yourgenome.org/facts/what-is-crispr-cas9
