PS-1 Beyond Gene Editing : Current Status and Future Applications of Synthetic Biology in Plants

Synthetic biology is still a nascent area in plant biology. Synthetic biology can be defined simply as applying engineering principles to biology. It relies on designing, building, and testing components, just like engineers do, when making a device. In our case the device is a modified plant consisting of new ‘parts.’The parts are mostly made of DNA. They are genes, gene expression regulators, parts of genes, or, collections of genes. So far, the biggest application of synthetic biology in plants is gene editing using CRISPR systems–essentially ‘rewriting’ genes– but my goal is to extend the full power of synthetic biology into ‘writing’ DNA at a large scale into genomes. Theoretically the ‘writing’ can result in the entire genome of plants, which is far beyond what is currently feasible. The best I’ve hoped for is to rewrite the chloroplast genome of 100 genes: a synthetic chloroplast genome or “synplastome.” I will discuss the work of my group toward designing, building and installing the first synplastome in plants as well as mini-synplastomes.