Traditional crop enhancement has focused on selecting for genotypes that lead to trait enhancements from pools of natural variation. This strategy suffers from drawbacks associated with its slow speed, reliance on evolutionarily constrained variation, and negative side effects from pleiotropies and linkage drag. Reengineering plants with synthetic biology presents a promising avenue to overcome these challenges. However, predictably altering developmental or metabolic traits is challenging as they tend to be multigenic, cross-regulated, and dependent on spatiotemporal coordination of gene expression. We are developing control systems to modulate expression across multiple genes, as well as in planta methods to rapidly prototype control system architectures and the phenotypic outcomesof expression reprogramming.
Friday 15 November | 2:30pm to 3:30pm | Seminar Room 319, Botany Building, CB2 3EA
by Arjun Khakar (Assistant Professor, Colorado State University, USA) hosted by Nicola Patron