Reconstructing Regulation: Can Biological Complexity be Reverse Engineered?

Plants provide the potential for rapid production of complex molecules from water and light but, until recently, we lacked the tools and data necessary for complex engineering of plant systems. Until recently, a paucity of data for cis-regulatory elements in plants meant that it was challenging to determine how individual sequence elements contributed to transcriptional function. We have identified functional elements and established a quantitative experimental system to investigate transcriptional function, investigating how identity, density and position contribute to regulatory function. We then identified permissive architectures for minimal synthetic plant promoters enabling the computational design of a suite of synthetic promoters of different strengths. These have been used to regulate the relative expression of output genes in simple genetic devices. We are applying these methods to engineer plants as photosynthetic biomanufacturing platforms and to improve agricultural and nutritional traits in crops.