Recent Posts

Regulated and optimized control of insect pheromone biosynthesis in plants

Insect sex pheromones, volatile molecules used to attract mates, are used commercially to disrupt breeding behavior of insect pests and can be a good alternative to harmful pesticides. These pheromones have been produced in plants at a low amount and shown to be released as volatiles, but their production…

Bioengineered “pikobodies” confer plant disease resistance

The vertebrate adaptive immune system is truly an evolutionary marvel. With its ability to mix-and-match segments of immunoglobulin genes, a nearly unlimited diversity of antigens can be recognized. Plants lack this ability, greatly limiting the number of antigens (and pathogens) any individual can recognize.…

Synthetic genetic circuits as a means of reprogramming plant roots (Science)

Synthetic genetic circuits offer a promising method to achieve beneficial changes in plant phenotypic traits. By combining different activator or repressor transcription factors (TFs) , the expression of target genes may be fine-tuned according to Boolean operations. Here, Brophy et al. describe a method…

A synthetic switch based on orange carotenoid protein to control blue-green light responses in chloroplasts (Plant Physiol)

Synthetic biology aims to engineer and redesign components of natural organisms for useful purposes.  One of the most prolific areas of synthetic biology is based on the engineering of photoreactive proteins with signaling potential, such as photoreceptors. Natural photoreceptors consist of a prosthetic…

Review. Plant synthetic biology for producing potent phyto-antimicrobials to combat antimicrobial resistance

Covid has turned our focus to human viral pathogens, but the challenges we face from cellular pathogens has not gone away, and is increasingly exacerbated by the development of resistance to antibiotics and other antimicrobials. This fine review by Tiwari et al. provides an overview of how antimicrobials…

Excising the mystery of single guide RNA processing

Sophia G. Zebell Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA zebell@cshl.edu Over the past 10 years, utilization of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing in plants has rapidly and significantly altered the scale and scope of both basic research and crop development.…

Review: The second decade of synthetic biology: 2010–2020 (Nature Comms.)

I guess if this were a normal year, we’d be spending time looking back over the past decade, but Covid-19 has made anything pre-2019 seem like a different lifetime. Still, here’s a retrospective you don’t want to miss. Meng and Ellis take us on a short walk down memory lane through the “second…

An Alternative Route for Astaxanthin Biosynthesis in Green Algae

Tianhu Sun ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2513-1387 Plant Breeding and Genetics Section, School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853 ts753@cornell.edu Astaxanthin is the reddish carotenoid pigment that gives color to shrimp, salmon, and flamingo. However, these animals…

Back to the Future for Plant Rubisco Bioengineering

Martin-Avila et al. use synthetic biology to improve photosynthesis in tobacco by swapping out the endogenous small subunits of Rubisco for one coming from potato, among other things. Plant Cell https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.20.00288 By Spencer Whitney, Elena Martin-Avila, Sally Buck, Timothy Rhodes,…