NRT: Plants-3D (Discover, Design and Deploy): Training Diverse Graduate Student Cohorts in Plant Synthetic Biology

全球粮食安全是世纪最大的挑战之一。要在2050年前满足90亿人的营养需求，就需要大幅提高作物生产力，降低害虫和病原体的易感性，增强对干旱、盐碱、洪水、极端温度和养分缺乏的抵抗力。植物提供食物，纤维和生物分子用于医药和无数的行业。迫切需要提高植物对环境的适应能力，以及植物化学工业的快速增长，对劳动力的可用性和培训提出了很高的要求。值得注意的是，只有3%的生物技术劳动力是西班牙裔或非洲裔美国人。这个国家科学基金会研究培训（NRT）奖给加州滨江大学将通过建立在该机构的有效模式，少数民族和第一代本科教育在干增加国家的农业生物技术劳动力的多样性和能力。Plants 3D（发现、设计、部署）项目将提供植物科学和工程方面的跨学科培训。该项目预计将培训50多名硕士和博士生，其中包括28名受资助的受训人员，他们将接受植物科学、环境和化学工程方面的交叉培训。这些受训人员将为工业界、学术界和政府机构的农业生物技术职业做好准备。PLANTS 3D NRT项目将开展跨学科研究和培训，以应对与粮食安全和人类健康相关的植物科学挑战，并培养创业技能。 它将利用基因组资源和合成生物学的生物和工程工具来了解植物胁迫传感和保护反应，植物-微生物相互作用，并增加高价值植物化学物质的生产。PLANTS 3D NRT项目将培养研究生：（i）发现植物用于感知和响应非生物和生物信号或产生有价值的天然产物的途径;（ii）设计调节胁迫耐受性或合成生物学工具的新型信号传导组分，以有效转化和表达优化的植物代谢途径;和（iii）在作物中使用工程化的胁迫耐受途径或在微生物宿主中产生有价值的代谢物的生物合成途径。PLANTS 3D联合了植物生物学，合成生物学和工程学方面的教师专家来实现这些目标。学生将接受知识和工具跨学科整合的培训，以团队形式创建解决方案和创业精神，加速将他们的发现转化为实际应用。学员还将有机会在各种农业，生物技术或制药公司实习。NSF研究培训（NRT）计划旨在鼓励为STEM研究生教育培训开发和实施大胆的，新的潜在变革模式。该计划致力于通过创新的、基于证据的、与不断变化的劳动力和研究需求相一致的综合培训模式，在高优先级的跨学科或融合研究领域对STEM研究生进行有效培训。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Global food security is among the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Meeting the nutritional needs of 9 billion people by 2050 will require significant increases in crop productivity, a reduction in pest and pathogen susceptibility, and enhanced resistance to drought, salinity, flooding, temperature extremes and nutrient deficiency. Plants provide food, fiber and biomolecules used in medicine and a myriad of industries. The critical need to improve the environmental resilience of plants and the rapid growth of the plant-based chemical industry has placed high demands on workforce availability and training. Remarkably, only 3% of the biotechnology workforce is Hispanic or African-American. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the University of California Riverside will increase the diversity and capacity of the nation's workforce in agricultural biotechnology by building upon the institution's effective model for minority and first-generation undergraduate education in STEM. The Plants3D (Discover, Design, Deploy) project will provide interdisciplinary training in plant science and engineering. The project anticipates training over fifty (50) MS and PhD students, including twenty-eight (28) funded trainees who will be cross-trained in plant science and environmental and chemical engineering. These trainees will be prepared for agricultural biotechnology careers in industry, academia and government agencies. The PLANTS3D NRT project will undertake interdisciplinary research and training to address plant science challenges related to food security and human health and to foster entrepreneurial skills. It will leverage genomic resources and the biological and engineering tools of synthetic biology to understand plant stress sensing and protective responses, plant-microbe interactions, and to increase production of high-value phytochemicals. The PLANTS3D NRT project will train graduate students to: (i) discover pathways that plants use to sense and respond to abiotic and biotic signals or produce valuable natural products; (ii) design novel signaling components that regulate stress tolerance or synthetic biology tools to efficiently transform and express optimized plant metabolic pathways; and (iii) deploy engineered stress tolerance pathways in crops or biosynthetic pathways that produce valuable metabolites in microbial hosts. PLANTS3D unites faculty experts in plant biology, synthetic biology and engineering to achieve these goals. Students will be trained in the transdisciplinary integration of knowledge and tools to create solutions and entrepreneurialism as teams to accelerate the translation of their discoveries to practical applications. Trainees will also have opportunities to intern with a variety of agricultural, biotechnology or pharmaceutical firms. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.