LabtoFarmtoTable
Somewhere within the labyrinth that is the DiSTAP facility at NUS campus is a small well-secured lab with rows of steel racks holding small pots of gailan – Chinese broccoli. The pots are packed one very shelves of the racks like an over crowded garden that is flourishing under a full-spectrum artificial light. From time to time, scientists armed with sensors would hover over the plants and carefully conduct a reading – specifically, they are trying to detect plant stress.
“We are working to address highimpact problems in the areas of food production, food safety and food security in Singapore and globally,” explains Dr. Gajendra Pratap Singh who heads the facility that is developing analytical and genetic technologies that will “fundamentally change how plan tb io synthetic pathways are discovered, monitored, engineered and ultimately translated to meet the global demand for high quality food”.
Dr. Singh is the Principal Investigator and Scientific Director at Di ST AP, which stands Disruptive & Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision – an interdisciplinary group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology( SMART ), MIT’ s research enterprise in Singapore. Di STA Pi san equal partnership between SMART and the Te masek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL), Singapore. He works with scientists from MIT, NT U, NUS and TL Lin developing novel na no sensor fluorescence imaging and Ram an spectroscopy-based sensors to detect plant stress.
These analytical sensors can perform continuous measurements of plant stress by detecting important plant metabolites and hormones. As they can provide results in real time, they allow novel discovery, deeper understanding and control of plant b io synthetic pathways in ways not
yet possible, especially in the context of green leafy vegetables. “These new techniques can be lever aged to engineer plants with highly desirable properties for global food security, including high yield density production, drought and pathogen resistance and biosynthesis of highvalue commercial products.”
Lack of nutrients or sufficient light energy for proper growth, presence of soil contaminants like heavy metals, high temperature sand bacterial or fungal infection causes stress in plants, which ultimately decreases the productivity of crops and causes loss to the farmer, Dr. Singh elaborates. Although farmers are now using sensors that detect environmental parameters like temperature and humidity, there is still a need for sensors that directly investigate the chemicals a plant produces when under stress. “Such sensors will allow a farmer to intervene on time and save the crop value,” says Dr. Singh. “They will also remove subjective assessment of crop health, usually done by the eyes of an experienced farmer, and expedite automation, resulting in better profit for the farmers,” he adds.