Blog Posts

Viva la Clovalución - Update #5

The oppressors have evolved. In every era, in every region, there are winners and losers. Those who exploit and those who are exploited. The modern day, with its "woke AF"' generational change, has seen the examination of this relationship but largely ignored the continued oppression that exists in more subtle forms. Kinda whack, if we might add. The Global North, including historical colonists and relative newcomers, have wielded technology and industry at the expense of the Global South (Pic. 1). The biotechnology and agribusiness industries are distinct cases of groups that deploy barriers of knowledge and resources to bar technologies that could be a boon for farmers in the developing world.

Enjoy the complementary protest music as we tear down one biotech giant after another (Video 1).

If you're feeling sentimental like us, see Video 2 as we break down those emotional walls and let in the sadness of completing the last blog post.

Picture 1: Above is the "Brandt Line" dividing the more developed Global North and the less developed Global South. Think this line is just a theoretical buzzword? The countries that this line divides would beg to differ.

Video 1: Rage Against the Machine is quite the apt band name for this blog post. Enjoy the harsh power cords and coarse lyrics.

forever done.mov

Video 2: Our version of the hit 1984 ballad "Forever Young," in memoriam of our journey over these last few months.

Picture 2: Ah, to be young and in love with clover. Oh, wait. That's still us. We may look a little loco, but we still got that drive to make our world better.

Welcome to our final blog post. It certainly has been a journey. We've found the inspiration of plants, the fun in science, and the hard work of presenting our data. Now, it's time to look back at what we have accomplished with a fresh perspective, perhaps a tad more of the long game of this research. A bunch of goofy senior high schoolers have emerged as equally goofy students (Pic. 2), yet our research has given us a new look at the forces that keep the oppressed down. Y'all, we still got a ways to go.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

-Karl Marx

So what's new, you might ask, if oppression has been around forever? Woah, let's not get ahead of ourselves. To talk of the present and think of the future, let's take a little gander at our roots...get it? In fact, let's start at the germination of this idea. (someone stop me, please)

Once we were accepted into the Biotech II Program, our minds roared with ideas, good and bad. We finally settled on one that we were all passionate about: inoculation. It might sound odd that three teenagers could find such a love in symbiotic relationships between bacteria and legumes, but the impact it could have on people was undeniably compelling. The clovateriats seemed to have the ability to overthrow the poor soilgeoisie after consistent overcultivation and exploitation of soil's labor left soil infertile. In less manifesto-oriented lingo, clover and other legumes seemed like a great option to repair soil that was repeatedly used up to produce high-protein crops. The essence of inoculation? When you add bacteria to the mix, that process gets a whole lot easier. Bacteria aids legumes in a process known as nitrogen fixation, where nitrogen is "fixated" from the atmospheric form to a usable form for the plant. Especially in less developed countries experiencing large population growth, soil quality can suffer greatly (Pic. 3).

In the summer, we started to try out the whole planting thing. Ya know, getting back to our roots and all. While we failed miserably the first time, the plants eventually lifted their mighty leaves to the sky, and we grew our first clover (Pic. 5). We endowed life to our project, and thus life to a new charge on the biotech-industrial complex.

In order to start our research in full, it became necessary to put down on paper our project. Lofty ideals and daydreams transformed into cold-hard numbers and realistic protocols. Time became a factor, and slowly but surely our project solidified. After writing a monstrous proposal, an in-person pitch was necessary to get "approved" and receive funding (Pic. 6). To persuade our audience and make them feel the urgency of this problem of endemic and global inequality, our group had to refine our message. It really came down to this:

Population is increasing
Soil quality is bad
We need a solution

With these simple parameters, we opened up the subject to contributors and common folk as they watched our pitch.

Picture 3: These population pyramids show the age distribution of Sweden, considered a fully developed country, and Nigeria, a rapidly growing country. Most of Nigeria is extremely young, so the population is expected to grow even further in the future. They're going to have a whole lot of mouths to feed. (Source: CIA World Factbook)

Picture 4: "I don't know, when Rhizobium clover and clover meet, it just kinda clicked. Almost like a symbiosis between two organisms haha..."

Picture 5: Under the sweltering sun, we toiled under oppressive conditions to nurture our little plant babies to life. Our first pretrial had begun.

Picture 6: The big pitch date, hurray! Fighting for our research meant fighting for those who we impact, tightening our mission as well as the breadth of the research. Also, it was really nerve-wracking.

"The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall."

-Che Guevara

The news of our successful pitch sent us straight into our research with excitement and determination. We first had to collect our materials and began our planting, and soon, as the biggest limit on our research was time. The plant cart we used to grow our plants, with a light cycle of 16 hours of daylight and 8 hours of darkness, was wheeled to Derek's home; the liquid treatments, inoculant powder, and extraneous husbandry tools were purchased. We calculated and combined the best ratios of seeds, inoculant powder, and liquid treatment, creating an inoculant mixture for each of our five treatments and one positive control. Once this mixture was planted in a plant tray, we watered and nurtured our plants for 51 days.

The initial motivation we felt when beginning our research quickly faded as we began our first assay: the nodule count. To do this test for nodulation, we uprooted a few clover plants from each treatment, rinsed the roots, and counted each nodule under a microscope. This was a laborious task, as we had to look at each individual root from a cluster of plants, in nearly every class and off period for a month, straining our eyes and backs. We pushed through, however, and were able to do our biomass assay, which was simply taking the mass of the roots so we could normalize our data (by analyzing in nodules per milligram of root). Our largest frustration came with our third assay, the leghemoglobin assay, where we planned to analyze the amount of the protein leghemoglobin in the nodules, as the presence of said protein is a direct indicator of successful nitrogen fixation. We grinded the roots we collected and mixed it with a phosphate buffer, creating a solution that would hopefully have the protein. We realized, however, after creating these mixtures, that we didn't have the technology to detect the protein's presence, so we threw this assay out.

The loss of our third assay failed to disillusion us from our determination to find results, however, so we stubbornly performed our data analysis on the results obtained from the nodule and biomass assays.

Picture 7: The above table is an Excel-run test of the "statistical significance" of the data. Two-tailed t-tests were run to determine that only Trials 2 and 6 (Coca-Cola and gum Arabic, respectively) improved nodulation in a statistically-significant way, where the p-value is less than 0.05. When compared to each other in the bottom table, no statistically-significant advantage was found between Coca-Cola and gum Arabic.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that [not all data] is created equal."

-Declaration of Independence

The results could have produced nothing, and our passion for broad change would remain. But we did find something compelling. Gum Arabic and Coca-Cola were the only treatments that significantly improved nodulation and, therefore, nitrogen fixation. The commercial standard is gum Arabic, while Coca-Cola is a nearly ubiquitous liquid. When we compared these solutions to each other, neither treatment had a statistically significant advantage. The two are equal in efficacy (Pic. 7). OK, so what does that mean? Gum Arabic can be hard to find, and quality samples from companies like Sigma-Aldrich can cost over $50 per pound. Coca-Cola, however, is extremely cheap, even in bulk. So much so, that according to extrapolations produced by our procedures, Coca-Cola is 45 times cheaper per acre when compared to gum Arabic ($1.80/acre to $93.65/acre).

Why do the biotechnology and agribusiness industries consistently push for the more expensive commercial standard?

Why are studies that question the efficacy of such standards nonexistent or hidden behind paywalls?

There are hidden forces of the economy and its invisible hand all around us, but the manipulation of that hand for the benefit of some and at the detriment of many others is far more visible. There are clear and compelling blind spots in one of the most lucrative industries in the world. Biotech can be the savior of humanity, and it can cure all maladies, but that does not make it perfect. Biotech is not faultless.

"Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people."

-Marcus Garvey

Bright-eyed and full of fire, we wanted to share our results with the science community. Yet, we realized that idealism and data cannot be the sole drivers of change. The ability to present science is vital to the dissemination of its knowledge. We summarized our findings onto a poster, simplified scientific jargon, and added visualize to make our research as comprehensible as possible. The Denver Regional Science and Engineering Fair was our most recent venture in this realm. We set up our station and stood for hours to get our results and recommendations across to local scientists and fair judges (Pic. 8). In the end, our research won 1st place in the Plant Sciences division. (Yay!) Our efforts in this competition were not for direct change, but the lessons we learned and the skills that we refined are certainly important for any real change in the world (Pic. 9).

We will be competing in the Colorado Science and Engineering Fair in early April as our next step after the regional fair, as well as CWJAS later that month. Our final action as a team will be the Symposium in May, educating our supports on our finalized research.

Picture 8: The young scholars, i.e. us, prepare for a day of presentation and science at the Denver Metro Regional Science and Engineering Fair (known as DMRSEF).

Picture 9: Science is serious and has world-changing impact, but a high school science fair perhaps has less than revolutionary fervor. This CU-Denver Lynx kept us grounded in the competition.

"The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people."

-Cesar Chavez

Although we entered the Biotech II program with a distinct goal of doing valuable research, we are leaving it with so much more. Despite already being good friends, working together through the stress of the pitch, deadlines, and science fair allowed us to grow much closer. We developed many key values, such as perseverance and communication. Most importantly, we learned how to independently perform research and produce results in a comprehensible manner, with little to no aid.

We would also like to thank the many people that have helped us throughout this past year. Mrs. Fordham, Mrs. Petri, and Mr. Winkelman were integral instructors in many valuable ways, teaching us how to go through the research process and aiding us with the logistics of everything we did. Our parents, Laura and Todd Wheeler, Marta and Mark Fearon, and Kathryn and Reed James, supported many late nights and biotech events, providing love and care when we most needed it.