Plant synthetic biology uses plants as platforms in the design and redesign of biological parts, pathways, and systems. The emerging field relies on computational modeling and analysis to design biological functions and ensure sustainable traits. This supplement will consist of a series of articles that will introduce the reader to plant synthetic biology.
The first article in the supplement will be a brief history on plant engineering. This article will give a general overview of early plant mutagenesis, development of transgenesis, and end with a discussion on the different methods of assembling DNA into plant binary plasmids.
The second article describes some of the hurdles behind precise control of transgene expression in plants, and explains how synthetic promoters and transcription factors could make an impact in metabolic engineering applications in this field. Synthetic promoters can be designed rationally to provide tremendous advantages over their natural counterparts in terms of promoter strength and specificity. They could be used for coordinated gene expression for metabolic engineering and synthetic device construction in plants.
The next article will describe some of the challenges behind gene delivery to plants. Since the first transgenic plants were created in 1980s, synthetic biology seeks to develop and advance new methods of gene delivery systems for plants. Traditional methods of gene delivery to plants are labor and time intensive, with restricted host range, high toxicity and low practical applicability. This article discusses how nanoparticle-based approaches could enable efficient gene transfer into plants.
The final article offers an account of some current synthetic biology approaches undertaken to engineer chloroplasts into effective, light-driven production units for high-value bioactive natural products such as pharmaceutically important, structurally complex diterpenoids. The authors describe the challenges behind direct channeling of photosynthetic electron flow into light-driven synthesis of high-value products.