Objective:
A major goal of plant synthetic biology is to create smart plants that are able to respond to key cues and display a variety of agronomically valuable traits such as enhanced stress resilience or the biosynthesis of high-value compounds. The objectives of the SMARTPLANTS consortium are to develop parallel regulatory networks (PaRNets) that are based on cues that plants normally encounter in their growth cycle, namely flowering and temperature changes, and translate these into metabolic engineering-based outputs to produce high value or stress-protecting compounds. Flowering is accompanied by a dramatic metabolic switch leading to the massive transfer of resources from the leaves to the seeds or the fruits. However, there is still significant biomass remaining in the leaves and stems. By developing a PaRNet that uses flowering as a trigger, we will capture part of this biomass to convert it to a high-value compound, the diterpene cis-abienol. Our flowering PaRNet will be based on the florigen signal encoded by the conserved FT gene. Similarly, we will develop a PaRNet based on temperature fluctuations to induce upon higher temperatures the production of isoprene, a compound conferring heat-stress protection.
Project summary:
A major goal of plant synthetic biology is to create smart plants that are able to respond to key cues and display a variety of agronomically valuable traits such as enhanced stress resilience or the biosynthesis of high value compounds. The objectives of the SmartPlants consortium coordinated by Prof. Alain Tissier are to develop parallel regulatory networks (PaRNets) that are based on cues that plants normally encounter in their growth cycle and to translate these into metabolic engineering-based outputs to produce high value or stress-protecting compounds. Both the regulatory network and the metabolic engineering optimisation procedures will be assisted by modelling in iterative rounds.
Project No. ERASynBio ID:2-23
Source of funding: FP7 EraSynBio (2nd call)
Project period: 18.08.2015 – 17.08.2018 (36 months)
Total budget: 1 481 000 EUR (210 000 EUR for CSBG)
Project coordinator: Pr. Dr. Alain Tissier, Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry, Germany
Project coordinator from our group: Senior researcher, Agris Pentjuss, Agris.Pentjuss@gmail.com
Results:
Petrovs R., Stalidzans E., Pentjuss A. (2021) IMFLer: A Web Application for Interactive Metabolic Flux Analysis and Visualization, Journal of Computational Biology, 28(10), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1089/cmb.2021.0056
Project partners:
- Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry, Germany;
- University of Cambridge, Sainsbury Laboratory, United Kingdom