About This Project

In light of population growth and a changing global climate, plants are at the core of our sustainability efforts, both at the levels of food availability and environmental remediation. Inevitably, engineering smarter plants will require creation of emerging technology to produce more prolific crops, more robust plants, and greater availability of food. To address these challenges, my lab is generating engineered cell penetrating peptides for a broad range of plant bioengineering applications.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Plants serve critical roles as crops, sources of medicines, engineering substrates for recombinant products, and as carbon-sinks. Population growth, climate change, and disease pose serious challenges to systems reliant on plants. The twin challenges of population growth and climate change exacerbate food insecurity due to increased demand and falling yields. Plant genetic engineering could rapidly expand the natural capabilities of our plants and crops and is therefore a core biotechnology tool for overcoming the aforementioned challenges. However, current methodologies of genetically manipulating plants are laborious and applicable to only a narrow range of species that often exclude our crops, thus new approaches and tools for plant genetic engineering are required.

What is the significance of this project?

My lab has generated preliminary data suggesting that engineered plant peptides could increase the throughput of genetic engineering and post-transcriptional manipulation of plants in a manner that is (i) plant species-independent, and (ii) works in plant germline tissues. Here, we propose to use our tools for plant germline cell genetic and post-transcriptional manipulation, a feat which is currently impossible for crops and would enable plant bioengineering without the lengthy and laborious process of plant tissue culture for plant regeneration. The ability to avoid plant regeneration with our engineered peptides would exponentially expedite plant biology research and agriculture, enabling the production of climate-robust crops within months or years instead of decades.

What are the goals of the project?

Plant bioengineering today is accomplished with one of two tools (agrobacterium and biolistics), and neither of these tools can deliver cargoes to plant germline tissues. As a result, all plant bioengineering has to go through plant tissue culture, a time-intensive process limited to a narrow set of species and genotypes, and sometimes regeneration isn’t possible for crops altogether. Our goal is to eliminate the need for plant tissue culture protocols that slow progress across agricultural biotechnology can only be ameliorated by a technology that enables genetic cargo delivery to plant germline tissues. To do so, we will test engineered peptides for plant germline bioengineering, which will enable genetic manipulation of plants ~10-fold faster than currently attainable.