21ENGBIO Genomic switches for carbon dot activated combinatorial plant engineering

21ENGBIO 用于碳点激活组合植物工程的基因组开关

• 批准号: BB/W012324/1
• 负责人: Heather Whitney
• 金额: $ 12.76万
• 依托单位: University of Bristol
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=BB%2FW012324%2F1
• 关键词: 21ENGBIO; Genomic; switches; carbon; dot

Plants have the potential to contribute to solving many of the global societal challenges, from food security to climate change. They are capable of producing most of the materials that society needs, from food, fibres, materials to an astounding diversity of secondary metabolites, and do this while sequestering carbon. Synthetic Biology has the potential to exploit these abilities of plants and make this list even longer, an excellent example being the recent successful production of COVID vaccine in tobacco plants. However, the development of plants as a system that is as straightforward to genetically 'program' in the way that for example bacteria can be is held back due to the lack of ease and flexibility in delivering the nucleotide 'apps' into the biological 'hardware'. Plant transformation can be slow, inefficient and frequently not work at all in genetically recalcitrant plants. Our project aims to develop new tools to overcome this by developing new ways of using cutting-edge nanomaterial-based plant transformation. Due to the chemical functionalisation, this nanomaterial delivery is fast, very simple and flexible (the nanomaterial-nucleotide complex can be sprayed onto plants) and can be used on most species of plant. This means that we have to potential to develop 'genetic switches' or even 'genetic apps' for plants. We aim to see if the new nanomaterial delivery method can be used to deliver 'spray-on' switches by using them in combination with 'pre-loaded software' (synthetic sequences stably integrated into the plant genome) that, when switched on changes the colour of the plant by producing a scarlet pigment that the switches will turn on or off. We also aim to see if both the switches and the genes they control can be delivered in tandem by nanomaterials. We hope that this combined approach will start to develop the technology needed to make programable plants that would than have an astounding array of possibilities for the application of engineering biology.

植物有潜力为解决从粮食安全到气候变化等许多全球社会挑战做出贡献。它们能够生产社会所需的大部分材料，从食物、纤维、材料到种类繁多的次生代谢物，并同时固碳。合成生物学有潜力利用植物的这些能力，使这个列表变得更长，一个很好的例子就是最近在烟草植物中成功生产新冠疫苗。然而，由于将核苷酸“应用程序”传递到生物“硬件”中缺乏简便性和灵活性，植物作为一种像细菌一样直接进行遗传“编程”的系统的发展受到阻碍。植物转化可能是缓慢的、低效的，并且在遗传顽抗植物中常常根本不起作用。我们的项目旨在通过开发使用基于尖端纳米材料的植物转化的新方法来开发新工具来克服这一问题。由于化学功能化，这种纳米材料递送快速、非常简单且灵活（纳米材料-核苷酸复合物可以喷洒到植物上）并且可用于大多数植物物种。这意味着我们必须有潜力为植物开发“基因开关”甚至“基因应用程序”。我们的目的是看看新的纳米材料传递方法是否可以用于传递“喷雾”开关，通过将它们与“预加载软件”（稳定整合到植物基因组中的合成序列）结合使用，当打开时，通过产生开关将打开或关闭的猩红色颜料来改变植物的颜色。我们还想看看开关和它们控制的基因是否可以通过纳米材料串联传递。我们希望这种组合方法将开始开发制造可编程植物所需的技术，从而为工程生物学的应用提供一系列令人震惊的可能性。