Patron Group: Engineering field-deployable plant gene circuits
Supervisor:
Dr Nicola Patron
Background:
As sessile organisms, plants evolved the ability to sense changes in their environments and respond to them by altering their growth, development or metabolism. Thus they are primed to function as real-time, sophisticated environmental monitors.
Importance of Research:
Synthetic biology applies engineering principles to the construction of genetic circuits to achieve control over biological systems and to endow them with novel functions. By rewiring a plant's internal genetic circuitry, plants can be used as smart, self-reporting networks that collect and report information about their environment. This information can be used both to better understand plant responses and for biotechnology applications such as assessing the heath and quality of agricultural systems, and environmental monitoring.
Project Summary:
Recent years have seen the development of several genetic biosensors and inducible controllers for plant systems. However, there are still multiple barriers to the field deployment and real-world applicability of such systems. These include reliance on molecules that are unsuitable for field-based applications, the use of imprecise or systemwide circuit activation, and the use of output signals and reporters that are expensive to detect and cannot be scaled.
The aim of this project is to engineer genetic sensing circuits for the robust detection and integration of multiple environmental and user-supplied signals, contributing new knowledge to our understanding of gene regulation. It will also explore novel methods for indirect activation of genetic circuits across plant organs, and the development of output signals that can be easily detected and quantified in field settings.
What will the successful applicant do?
This project will employ design-build-test-learn cycles to engineer and validate novel synthetic genetic circuits that perform robustly. Work will focus on (i) incorporating new knowledge about cis-regulatory architecture and cell type specific expression into synthetic regulators and (ii) engineering mobile signalling molecules and (iii) assessing the transfer of microbial metabolic pathway into plants as robust output signals.