Recent Posts

Career building: Where do you want to go and how will you get there?

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Last month I spent a few days at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam, where I gave a talk about career building for early career researchers. I’ve shared the slides and here I summarize the take-home messages and links. Chance favors the prepared mind By now…

Review: Plant synthetic biology for molecular engineering of signalling and development

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Nemhauser and Torii define synthetic biology as “an engineering approach to design, build and analyize dynamic molecular devices and/or pathways from biological components to produce cells and organisms with customized functionality.” In their review, they describe several plant synthetic biology…

Review: Plant synthetic promoters and transcription factors

Many plant traits are multigenic, so engineering them requires modulating the expression of several genes simultaneously. Synthetic promoters and transcription factors offer such a possibility. For example, a cis-element can be introduced into the promoter of each gene of interest, and a synthetic transcription…

Review: Multi-gene engineering in plants with RNA-guided Cas9 nuclease ($)

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Raitskin and Patron review efforts to express multiple single guide RNA (sgRNAs) and Cas9 in plants for the coordinated expression of many genes. They argue for the need to create single plasmids carrying the sgRNAs and Cas9, using a Type IIS restriction endonuclease-mediated assembly method. Curr. Opin.…

Review: Using CRISPR/Cas in three dimensions: towards synthetic plant genomes, transcriptomes and epigenomes

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Puchta reviews the different ways that CRISPR/Cas9 can be used in synthetic biolgy, beyond the common gene-editing function. For example, the Cas9 protein can be fused to other proteins that activate or repress transcription, and targeted to different promoters using guide RNAs. He further explores the…