Over 420 million people worldwide have diabetes, many of whom depend on insulin therapy every day. As the disease continues to rise around the world, there is a need for making insulin production more sustainable and adaptable to the demands of local communities, especially socio-economically disadvantaged ones. The OpenPlant Community Project at Genspace, the world’s first community biology lab, is developing a low-cost DIY table-top plant incubator for growth of genetically engineered Marchantia polymorpha (liverwort) to express insulin. The project draws on the uniquely diverse expertise of Genspace community members who inspired this project through their desire to learn science. This community project teaches citizen scientists skills in genetic engineering, bioinformatics, and facilitates their contribution to novel scientific research. We are expressing insulin in liverwort using a two-step approach. Using agrobacterium-mediated transformation we randomly inserted a yellow fluorescent protein (YFP) into the liverwort genome. We developed a DIY plant incubator that has an infrared camera system to collect images and analyze them through computer vision to monitor growth and health so that we can remotely observe the YFP-transformed plants and efficiently select plants showing high levels of yellow fluorescence expression while retaining optimal growth and health. All of our incubator designs are shared open-source on Git-Hub. These select plants’ genomes are analyzed with bioinformatics and transcriptome data to determine ideal target insertion sites into the liverwort genome. Using CRISPR technology, the YFP gene is then replaced with the human insulin gene into targeted optimized insertion sites of the Marchantia polymorpha genome. Our community project in discovering optimized insertion sites for protein expression in the Marchantia polymorpha genome is novel, and is also a tool to make plant biotechnology more accessible to the community while simultaneously contributing to research for an alternative, more local, and sustainably source of insulin therapy.
