22BBSRC-NSF/BIO: A synthetic pyrenoid to guide the engineering of enhanced crops

要满足未来的全球粮食需求，就需要采用新的方法来培育高产作物，这些作物在气候变化面前也能茁壮成长。合成和工程生物学方法在应对这一挑战方面具有巨大的潜力。提高水稻和小麦等全球主要作物的产量和抗灾能力的一个主要机会在于提高它们吸收二氧化碳的能力，植物利用二氧化碳产生糖和淀粉以供生长。我们建议通过赋予作物一种称为类pyrenoid的特殊细胞隔室来增强它们对二氧化碳的吸收，这种隔室在真核藻类和一些低等陆地植物中自然进化而来，但在作物中不存在。在这里，作为实现这一目标的关键一步，我们将推进我们对类pyrenoids组装和结构的基本原理的理解，并将利用这一理解在模型陆地植物拟南芥中构建基于功能性合成类pyrenoids的二氧化碳浓缩机制。该项目有三个目标，每个目标都结合了试管中基于湿实验室的合成类pyrenoids实验和基于模型的补充分析，以推动工厂的工程努力。该项目建立在一个杰出的国际团队的综合成果基础上，该团队在推进类pyrenoid生物学知识和将藻类成分改造成陆生植物的能力方面有着良好的合作记录。该合作先前已经确定并表征了类pyrenoid的关键成分，收集了关于类pyrenoid如何组装的基本见解，生成了第一个计算模型来描述基于类pyrenoid的功能性二氧化碳浓缩机制是如何工作的，并成功地在拟南芥中组装了一个原型类pyrenoid。该项目将利用这些知识，使我们对具有生态和生物地球化学重要性的藻类机制的基本理解逐步发生变化，并将显著提高我们设计改善植物生长的能力。

Meeting future global food demands will require novel approaches for creating higher-yielding crops that are robust in the face of climate change. Synthetic and engineering biology approaches have huge potential to deliver on this challenge. A major opportunity for increasing the yields and resilience of major global crops such as rice and wheat lies in enhancing their ability to assimilate CO2, from which plants make sugars and starch for growth. We propose to enhance CO2 assimilation in crops by endowing them with a specialised cellular compartment called the pyrenoid that has naturally evolved in eukaryotic algae and some lower land plants but is not present in crops. Here, as a key step towards this goal, we will advance our basic understanding of the principles that underlie the assembly and architecture of pyrenoids and will leverage this understanding to build a functional synthetic pyrenoid-based CO2-concentrating mechanism into the model land plant Arabidopsis. The project has three aims, each of which combines wet-lab based experimentation on synthetic pyrenoids in test tubes and complementary model-based analyses to push forward the engineering efforts in plants. The project builds on the combined outputs of an outstanding international team with a strong track record of collaboration in advancing both the knowledge of pyrenoid biology and the ability to engineer algal components into land plants. The collaboration has previously identified and characterised key pyrenoid components, gleaned fundamental insights into how the pyrenoid is assembled, generated the first computational model to describe how a functional pyrenoid-based CO2-concentrating mechanism works, and successfully assembled a prototype pyrenoid in Arabidopsis. This project will leverage this knowledge to generate a step-change in our basic understanding of an algal mechanism that is of ecological and biogeochemical importance and will significantly advance our ability to engineer improved plant growth.