Synthetic Botany

Abstract

Plants are attractive platforms for synthetic biology and metabolic engineering. Plants' modular and plastic body plans, capacity for photosynthesis, extensive secondary metabolism, and agronomic systems for large-scale production make them ideal targets for genetic reprogramming. However, efforts in this area have been constrained by slow growth, long life cycles, the requirement for specialized facilities, a paucity of efficient tools for genetic manipulation, and the complexity of multicellularity. There is a need for better experimental and theoretical frameworks to understand the way genetic networks, cellular populations, and tissue-wide physical processes interact at different scales. We highlight new approaches to the DNA-based manipulation of plants and the use of advanced quantitative imaging techniques in simple plant models such as Marchantia polymorpha. These offer the prospects of improved understanding of plant dynamics and new approaches to rational engineering of plant traits.

Engineering Strategies to Boost Crop Productivity by Cutting Respiratory Carbon Loss

“…At present, almost all engineering of plant gene expression uses natural regulatory parts, leaving engineered genes open to unwanted crosstalk from endogenous control systems in the host. Fortunately, the fastgrowing field of synthetic regulatory circuits in plants (Boehm et al, 2017;Kassaw et al, 2018) can provide orthogonal systems to modulate gene expression; these may be very useful in reengineering genes that drive carbon loss. Finally, we acknowledge that smart breeding approaches that integrate multiple processes and focus on phenotypic outputs like growth rate and yield provide an alternative to directed engineering of metabolic subprocesses, and that directed approaches might fail if the various subprocesses interact in a nonlinear and hence difficult-to-predict manner on emergent agronomic traits.…”

The Synthetic Biology Toolkit for Photosynthetic Microorganisms

“…The main eukaryotic chassis are Saccharomyces cerevisiae and mammalian cells (Adams, 2016). In the case of photosynthetic eukaryotes, synthetic biology tools have been developed for Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) and Marchantia polymorpha (Boehm et al, 2017); however, unicellular chassis have only emerged recently. Many eukaryotic algal genomes have been sequenced (data from the National Center for Biotechnology Information Genome, https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/): 64 green algae, nine red algae, nine diatoms, five dinoflagellates, and three brown algae.…”

Network-based approaches to quantify multicellular development

“…Understanding these extant topologies, and revealing the principles underlying the drive to complexity may also pave the way for the prediction of future organ designs through morphospace analyses [ 9 ]. Such approaches combined with synthetic biology [ 97 , 98 ] can provide a discrete framework for the rational re-engineering of complex multicellular systems [ 99 ]. In this way, organisms with novel functions may be generated following known structure–function principles, through morphogenetic engineering [ 100 ].…”