Synthetic Biology
Plant Synthetic Biology
June Medford
Colorado State University, USA
Email
Website: Medford lab
Speaker abstract
Plants have long provided human needs in terms of food, fuel, structures and fibers. Synthetic biology provides a means to re-design plants and algae to help build a sustainable future. Because plants are sessile they have developed highly specific means to sense and respond to their environments. To adapt these abilities for human interest we used computationally re-designed receptors and linked input from these receptors with a histidine kinase mediated eukaryotic synthetic signal transduction pathway to a plant response humans can readily detect. We are adapting advanced regulatory circuits to adapt synthetic signaling pathways and traits of interest. These traits can be used to regulate biofuels for technological applications or natural gene processes to dissect processes that underlie plant biology.
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