Plants provide us with food, textiles, construction materials, fuels, paper, adhesives, dyes, and resins and are also a source of a great diversity of biologically active small molecules, many of which are used as medicines. Synthetic biology has demonstrated that organisms, particularly yeasts and bacteria, can be genetically engineered to produce valuable molecules. Plants can potentially provide produce complex molecules rapidly but until recently, we lacked the tools and data needed to genetically engineer plants to do this.
Using comparative genomics and systems biology approaches, it is possible to understand how DNA relates to function and apply this knowledge to design and write new DNA sequences and to edit existing sequences to tailor plants as biomanufacturing platforms for products used in health, industry and agriculture.
0:00 Introduction
2:04 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine
7:53 Applying the principles of engineering to biology
14:11 Complex traits are the result of combinatorial interactions between suits of genes
15:00 Genetic (and epigenetic) variation in non-coding regulatory regions of multiple genes
16:41 Rewiring gene expression networks to engineer complex traits
28:53 Genome engineering tools induce targeted double-strand breaks in genomic DNA
38:41 Plant biologists use regulatory sequences of pathogens to overexpress genes
39:48 New technologies shed light on old data
Speaker profile: Nicola Patron is a molecular and synthetic biologist interested in the regulation of gene expression and understanding how cells respond and adapt to the presence of foreign molecules. These learnings are applied to tailoring photosynthetic organisms as platforms for biomanufacturing and improving the yield and nutritional value of crops using pathway and genome engineering. Nicola also co-directs the Earlham DNA Foundry, a facility developing automated, nanoscale workflows for biology and biotechnology. As a SynBioLEAP fellow, Nicola was recognized as an emerging leader in synthetic biology with a desire to help innovations in the laboratory achieve positive social impact. In that context, she also works on the complex questions of access and ownership that surround genetic sequences, enabling technologies and biomolecules. Nicola has a PhD in plant molecular biology and pursued postdoctoral research at The John Innes Centre and The University of British Columbia on the origin, evolution and impact of photosynthetic endosymbionts.
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Filmed at the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School, 2018.
