Imagine a plant with entirely new abilities – more nutritious food, crops that survive heatwaves, or leaves that grow useful materials.
Two groups involving researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences are among nine teams to have been awarded funding today from the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA)’s Synthetic Plants programme.
With this support, the researchers hope to unlock the technology to fast-track crop development and enhance plants with new qualities, like drought-tolerance to reduce the amount of water they need, or the ability to withstand pests and diseases.
Their research has the potential to revolutionise the future of agriculture and offer a radical new approach to securing food supply in the face of climate change.
Programmable plants – a major leap in plant biology
“We’re building the tools to make plants programmable, just like software. This isn’t science fiction – it’s the future of agriculture,” said Professor Jake Harris, Head of the Chromatin and Memory group, and project lead for one of the ARIA-funded projects.
Harris’ project is awarded £6.5 million to build the world’s first artificial plant chromosome.
The ambitious aim of the Synthetic Plants programme is to develop artificial chromosomes and chloroplasts that can survive in a living plant. If the teams achieve this, it will be one the most significant advances in plant synthetic biology.
The international team involves collaborators from The University of Western Australia, biotech company Phytoform Labs and the Australian Genome Foundry at Macquarie University.
“Our idea is that instead of modifying an existing chromosome, we design it from the ground up,” Professor Harris said.
He added: “We’re rethinking what plants can do for us. This synthetic chromosome could one day help grow crops that are more productive, more resilient, and better for the planet.”
While synthetic chromosomes have been achieved in simpler organisms, such as bacteria and yeast, this will be the first attempt to create and deploy one entirely from scratch in a plant.
The project will use the moss Physcomitrium patens – a unique, highly engineerable plant – as a development platform to build and test a bottom-up synthetic chromosome, before transferring it into potato plants.
It also opens new possibilities for growing food and medicines in space, and for indoor agriculture. It could allow scientists to give elite crop varieties disease resistance, or to grow productively in new climates and environments.
Unlocking powerful applications in agriculture
The second project, led by Professor Alison Smith and Dr Paweł Mordaka in the Plant Metabolism group, aims to use the synthetic chloroplasts to enable plants to fix nitrogen, and produce vitamin B12. The use of fertilisers to supply nitrogen and promote good crop yields is the greatest cause of pollution from agriculture; reducing the need for them would promote more sustainable food production systems.
This builds on their previous work to design and build the entire chloroplast genome for the simple single-cell alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.
The Cambridge researchers are awarded almost £1 million, as part of a £9 million grant to this project. They are working with an international team of researchers from the UK, USA and Germany to transfer this technology to build synthetic chloroplasts in potato plants.
Professor Smith said: “Our success would unlock powerful applications in agriculture, like plants capable of nitrogen fixation or producing essential nutrients like vitamin B12, potentially reducing fertiliser dependence and addressing malnutrition. These traits have tremendous potential should they be engineered into plants.”
She added: “It will enable scientists to surpass what can be accomplished with gene editing and equip plants with new functions, from reducing agricultural water use to protecting crop yields in uncertain conditions.”
A unique opportunity
The ambitiousness of this project is outside the scope of most other UK funding schemes. Professor Harris believes this stems from ARIA’s unique approach to developing the research opportunity and goal along with the research community.
Harris said: “ARIA had a couple of events with synthetic biologists to look at what’s on the edge of possible, what could be useful as a moonshot approach that could really change things.”
He added: “It’s a totally different way of seeing things. We went from ‘here’s what we want to see in the world’ to ‘how are we going to get there?’. It catalysed a different team and a different way of thinking.”
“This work moves us beyond the limitations of natural genomes. It’s about designing entirely new capabilities in plants – from the molecular level up.”
Currently, it typically takes eight years to develop a new crop variety in the UK, but with this new technology it could be a matter of one year or even less. The speed of development would be dramatically increased, much in the way that revolutionary protein-folding technology like AlphaFold has massively accelerated the process of drug discovery.
Synthetic biology is already revolutionising the world of healthcare and could transform agriculture if applied to tailoring plant traits.
About ARIA’s Synthetic Plants programme
Led by Programme Director Angie Burnett, ARIA’s Synthetic Plants programme will catalyse a new generation of major crops that are more productive, resilient and sustainable.
The R&D Creators are part of the first phase of this £62.4m programme, which brings together social scientists, synthetic biologists, and plant biologists.
In addition to this technical work, two teams of researchers will develop resources for public engagement and convene stakeholders to explore the social and ethical considerations around such breakthroughs.
Image: Professor Jake Harris, Professor Alison Smith and Dr Paweł Mordaka from Cambridge University's Department of Plant Sciences. Photo credits: University of Cambridge.