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

满足未来的全球粮食需求将需要新的方法，以创造出在气候变化面前茁壮成长的高产作物。合成和工程生物学方法具有巨大的潜力来应对这一挑战。提高水稻和小麦等主要全球作物的产量和弹性的一个主要机会在于增强它们吸收二氧化碳的能力，植物从中制造糖和淀粉以供生长。我们建议通过赋予作物一种特殊的细胞室来增强作物对二氧化碳的同化作用，这种细胞室被称为类蛋白核，它在真核藻和一些低等陆地植物中自然进化，但在农作物中不存在。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果核的组装和结构所依据的原理的基本理解，并将利用这一理解在模式陆地植物拟南芥中建立一个基于人工合成类果核的二氧化碳浓缩功能机制。该项目有三个目标，每个目标都结合了基于湿法实验室的试管合成吡喃类化合物实验和基于补充模型的分析，以推动工厂的工程工作。该项目建立在一个杰出的国际小组的综合成果的基础上，该小组在促进类蛋白核生物学知识和将藻类成分改造成陆地植物的能力方面有着良好的合作记录。这项合作之前已经确定并表征了关键的类果核成分，收集了关于类果核如何组装的基本见解，产生了第一个描述基于类果核的二氧化碳浓缩机制如何工作的计算模型，并成功地在拟南芥中组装了一个原型类果核。这个项目将利用这些知识来改变我们对藻类机制的基本理解，这具有生态和生物地球化学的重要性，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.