21ENGBIO Genomic switches for carbon dot activated combinatorial plant engineering

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、材料到惊人多样的次级代谢产物，并在这样做的同时吸收碳。合成生物学有潜力利用植物的这些能力，并使这一名单更长，一个很好的例子是最近在烟草植物中成功生产COVID疫苗。然而，植物作为一个系统的发展，是简单的遗传“程序”的方式，例如细菌可以是由于缺乏方便和灵活性，在提供核苷酸的“应用程序”到生物“硬件”。植物转化可能是缓慢的、低效的，并且在遗传上不稳定的植物中经常根本不起作用。我们的项目旨在开发新的工具，通过开发使用尖端纳米材料的植物转化的新方法来克服这一问题。由于化学功能化，这种纳米材料的递送是快速的，非常简单和灵活的（纳米材料-核苷酸复合物可以喷洒到植物上），并且可以用于大多数植物物种。这意味着我们有潜力为植物开发“基因开关”甚至“基因应用程序”。我们的目标是看看新的纳米材料输送方法是否可以用于通过将它们与“预装软件”（稳定整合到植物基因组中的合成序列）结合使用来提供“喷雾”开关，当开关打开时，通过产生开关将打开或关闭的猩红色来改变植物的颜色。我们的目标是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，这种结合的方法将开始开发制造可编程植物所需的技术，这将为工程生物学的应用提供令人震惊的可能性。

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.