{"id":3347,"date":"2014-09-22T09:00:16","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T09:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/indogomagazine.com\/indogo\/?p=3347"},"modified":"2014-09-25T18:59:25","modified_gmt":"2014-09-25T18:59:25","slug":"winner-google-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/indogomagazine.com\/indogo\/winner-google-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Winner Google Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three Girls Won The Google Science Fair With A Bacteria-Based Plan To Solve The Food Crisis.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Three young girls won the Google science fair on September 22 with their innovative way to feed the world: treat plants with bacteria to help farmers grow more food, faster \u2014 without genetic modification.<\/p>\n

“By the year 2050 we actually need 50 percent more food just to feed everyone,”Emer Hickey<\/strong>, one of the three winners, told Scientific American.<\/p>\n

\"Emer<\/a>

Ciara Judge (16), Sophie Healy-Thow (17), and Emer Hickey (16)<\/p><\/div>\n

Hickey worked with her classmates Ciara Judge<\/strong> and Sophie Healy<\/strong> on their project. The three teenage girls, who live in Ireland, were simultaneously learning about plants and world hunger. Their project “Combating the global food crisis: Diazotroph Bacteria As a Cereal Crop Growth Promoter” aims to tackle issues of world hunger by exploiting a curious relationship they found between bacteria and certain plants.<\/p>\n

Beneficial bacteria<\/strong>
\nAfter 11 months of hard work and dedication, the three teen microbiologists discovered that they could make crops yield more food and shorten the time it takes a plant to sprout from a seed \u2014 a process called germination<\/strong>. They shorten this time by infecting the crops with a bit of bacteria that’s been known to be advantageous to other crop plants.<\/p>\n

Their results have huge implications for increasing agricultural productivity and easing world hunger.<\/p>\n

The key to their success is a type of bacteria called rhizobia<\/strong>, which lives inside nodules, or the little nubs you sometimes see on plant roots. While we usually think of bacteria as dangerous, these are actually helpful to the plants. By converting nitrogen from the air into helpful compounds like ammonia, the bacteria aid plant growth.<\/p>\n

Hickey and her mother had found these nodules on the pea plants in their garden. Not understanding what they were, Hickey brought one of the plants to her science teacher, who told her their benefits to plant growth.<\/p>\n

\"rhizobia<\/a>

Rhizobia nodules on plant roots. (credit: Dave Whitinger \/ All Things Plants)<\/p><\/div>\n

These nodules are only found on certain plants including peas and beans. But the girls wondered, why wouldn’t these bacteria be beneficial to other species? \u2014 specifically grains like barley and oats, which are integral to our food supply.<\/p>\n

It turns out no one had studied what the bacteria might do for non-legume plants, particularly during stages of germination. So, the girls went to work.<\/p>\n

A root-hacking plan<\/strong>
\nThey attacked their work with meticulous detail. Using homemade equipment, they chose to test rhizobia’s affects on barley and oat seeds. In order to do this, the girls had to grow the bacteria and then infuse them into the seeds, which took many hours of preparation.<\/p>\n