Abstract
BackgroundPlant biotechnology can be leveraged to produce food, fuel, medicine, and materials. Standardized methods advocated by the synthetic biology community can accelerate the plant design cycle, ultimately making plant engineering more widely accessible to bioengineers who can contribute diverse creative input to the design process.ResultsThis paper presents work done largely by undergraduate students participating in the 2010 International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition. Described here is a framework for engineering the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana with standardized, BioBrick compatible vectors and parts available through the Registry of Standard Biological Parts (http://www.partsregistry.org). This system was used to engineer a proof-of-concept plant that exogenously expresses the taste-inverting protein miraculin.ConclusionsOur work is intended to encourage future iGEM teams and other synthetic biologists to use plants as a genetic chassis. Our workflow simplifies the use of standardized parts in plant systems, allowing the construction and expression of heterologous genes in plants within the timeframe allotted for typical iGEM projects.
Highlights
Plant biotechnology can be leveraged to produce food, fuel, medicine, and materials
We demonstrate the feasibility of small-scale engineering projects in the model organism, Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis), using a BioBrick-modified plant vector system (Figure 1), performed within the time constraints of the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition
Design of BioBrick compatible vectors for Arabidopsis transformation Arabidopsis is readily transformed by Agrobacterium: when a plant is injured, Agrobacterium migrates to the wound site and transfers the T-DNA region of its tumor-inducing (Ti) plasmid into the plant cell [20]
Summary
Standardized methods advocated by the synthetic biology community can accelerate the plant design cycle, making plant engineering more widely accessible to bioengineers who can contribute diverse creative input to the design process. Advances in the field of genetics and the advent of recombinant DNA technology accelerated our ability to manipulate food crops [1,2,3,4,5]. In contrast to previous developments in agricultural technology, genetic modification of plants has been primarily performed for the benefit of large-scale monocultures of agricultural crops. A plant engineering system is customizable, yet has convenient standard features that minimize the need to re-invent common steps such as transferring genetic material into the plant. We demonstrate the feasibility of small-scale engineering projects in the model organism, Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis), using a BioBrick-modified plant vector system (Figure 1), performed within the time constraints of the iGEM competition
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