Engineering plant organelles for food ingredient production

畜牧业对环境产生巨大影响，导致土地和水资源退化、生物多样性丧失和森林砍伐。对动物肉类替代品的需求已经增长，并将继续增长，但目前的替代系统，如发酵或实验室培养，仍然对环境产生净负面影响，释放出不受欢迎的副产品。该项目采用植物分子农业，这是一个新兴领域，利用光合生物生产商业和药用蛋白质，特别是叶绿体转化技术，以配置植物和藻类中的食品和肉类替代成分生产。叶绿体转化技术具有吸引人的特征，例如通过同源重组将转基因（单独或作为操纵子）特异性整合到质体基因组中，基于原核基因表达系统的高水平蛋白质表达的潜力和由于质体的母系遗传而导致的环境控制。成功的申请人将通过开发合成生物学工具来应对这些挑战，质体转化，例如启动子、UTR、整合位点、信号肽和多基因表达盒的有效配置，用于在植物和藻类系统中的最佳蛋白质表达。随后，将通过使用生物化学和生理学分析方法来表征转质体植物的表型。此外，将研究成功表达蛋白的下游加工程序，以进一步商业化。此外，开发的工具将进一步优化并应用于作物。

Livestock farming has an enormous environmental impact and contributes to land and water degradation, biodiversity loss, and deforestation. Demand for animal meat alternatives has grown and will continue to rise, however current alternative systems like fermentation or laboratory cultivation still have a net negative impact on the environment, releasing undesirable by-products. This project employs plant molecular farming, an emerging field that utilises photosynthetic organisms to produce commercial and pharmaceutical proteins and in particular, chloroplast transformation technologies to configure food and meat alternative ingredient production in both plants and algae. Chloroplast transformation technology carries attractive features such as the specific integration of transgenes -either individually or as operons- into the plastid genome through homologous recombination, the potential for high level protein expression based on a prokaryotic gene expression system and environmental containment because of the maternal inheritance of the plastids.The successful applicant will address these challenges by developing the synthetic biology tools for plastid transformation such as efficient configuration of promoters, UTRs, integration sites, signal peptides and multigene expression cassette for optimal protein expression in both plant and algae systems. Subsequently, the phenotype of the transplastomic plants will be characterised by using biochemical and physiological analysis methods. Furthermore, the downstream processing procedure will be investigated for the successfully expressed protein for further commercialisation. Moreover, the developed tools will be further optimised and applied for crop plants.