Plant synthetic biology

Abstract

Plant synthetic biology is an emerging field that combines engineering principles with plant biology toward the design and production of new devices. This emerging field should play an important role in future agriculture for traditional crop improvement, but also in enabling novel bioproduction in plants. In this review we discuss the design cycles of synthetic biology as well as key engineering principles, genetic parts, and computational tools that can be utilized in plant synthetic biology. Some pioneering examples are offered as a demonstration of how synthetic biology can be used to modify plants for specific purposes. These include synthetic sensors, synthetic metabolic pathways, and synthetic genomes. We also speculate about the future of synthetic biology of plants.

A Tightly Regulated Genetic Selection System with Signaling-Active Alleles of Phytochrome B

“…In conjunction with a desired gene of interest, eYHB alleles should be useful for identifying "neutral sites" that do not interfere with the specificity of the regulatory sequences used to control the expression of the transgene. Indeed, a more systematic analysis of regulatory sequences is needed to secure even more tightly regulated promoter-operator combinations critical for the success of synthetic biology applications (Liu and Stewart, 2015;Ghareeb et al, 2016).…”

New developments in green biotechnology - an inventory for RIVM

“…Particularly, recent work on (long) non-coding RNAs has contributed to the knowledge on the role of ncRNA in various pathways of gene regulation (Ariel et al 2015;Liu et al 2015) (see further section 4.7).…”

“…Definitions of the term entail engineering plants for new functions or devices (e.g. sensors) (Liu and Stewart 2015) that are not found in nature, in other words, intentional design of artificial biological systems (Lusser et al 2011). The field is still in its infancy and therefore we will limit ourselves to a few examples.…”

Mass spectrometry-guided refinement of chemical energy buffers

“…Recently, one witnesses a rapid development of related methods and applications of this new discipline. The ability to reconstruct biochemical circuits enhances our cognition of molecular mechanisms and fosters real-world applications [7,8].…”