The Advanced Research Invention Agency (ARIA) is providing a total of £62.4 million to fund projects aimed at developing a new generation of major crops that are more productive, resilient, and sustainable.
ARIA, a UK government agency, said that with the ability to create everything from food to pharmaceuticals, plants are critical to tackling food insecurity and climate change.
"To unlock their potential, we must accelerate the pace of agricultural innovation. Synthetic biology is already revolutionising the world of healthcare. Exploring its application to tailor the traits of plants has the potential to transform the agricultural industry and deliver valuable benefits ranging from food to pharmaceuticals and beyond," the agency said.
The funding in its synthetic plants programme will support nine research teams separated in two groups. The first group, known as TA1 will focus on developing synthetic genetic units that can give plants beneficial traits and characteristics. The second group, TA2, will lead public engagement on the social and ethical considerations around new and advanced technologies.
TA1 - also known as design, build and deliver - supports seven teams developing ways to build and introduce genetic instructions into chloroplasts and chromosomes, to provide crops with beneficial traits and characteristics such as higher yield, improved photosynthesis, and better tolerance to stressors. This work will initially focus on the potato.
Recipients of the funding in TA1 are teams are led by:
•University College London, which is receiving £8.9 million to carry out research on organisms that capture energy from sunlight – both land plants and algae – for the sustainable, affordable, and accessible production of valuable compounds for healthcare and manufacturing.
This work comes in three parts. First up is developing a new method for introducing synthetic genetic instructions to add new traits to crop plants, starting with the potato. It then aims to advance the ability to engineer chloroplasts – which capture sunlight for energy production, and then to build new tools that can work in multiple types of plants. "Ultimately, their vision is to use a wide range of photosynthetic organisms to make biopharmaceuticals, biopolymers and other bio-products," Aria said.
• The Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology is receiving £9.1 million to develop a streamlined platform for synthetic chloroplast genome assembly in solanaceous crops.
• The University of Oxford has been awarded £6.7 million to use natural variation within plant chloroplast genomes to improve productivity in crop plants. By transferring the precision designed chloroplast genome into plants like potatoes and wheat, the researchers hope to unlock "dramatic" increases in productivity and resilience.
• Syntato has been awarded £4.9 million. The London-based biotechnology company that designs and builds plant genomes, is exploring approaches to make chromosome engineering in plants more affordable, precise, and sustainable.
• Western University, Canada, has been awarded £870 000, to develop a fast and efficient method for building and delivering engineered chloroplast genomes into the potato.
• University of Manchester has been awarded £8.5 million to establish synthetic plant chromosome (SynPAC) technologies.
The University of Manchester project, led by the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, is looking at how advances in engineering biology can be leveraged to enhance the nutritional value and yields of crops as well as increase resilience to pest and diseases. Using SynPAC the researchers hope that novel traits could be introduced into crops, while maintaining the crops' existing characteristics.
SynPACs is a system for rapidly designing and delivering beneficial traits to plants, and enables researchers to produce multi-gene traits in a far more precise, controllable and predictable fashion, offering an alternative to conventional breeding methods. SynPACs will use common baker’s yeast as a DNA assembly line to assemble large segments of DNA into synthetic chromosomes, prior to direct transfer to the crops using methods developed at the John Innes Centre and characterised by the Earlham Institute.
With modern agriculture facing challenges from climate change to soil degradation, along with concerns over food security, the researchers hope that their work will go some way to finding a sustainable way secure the world’s food supplies. The researchers say that the project will help address the challenges faced in the agricultural sector by reducing the need for pesticides and supporting more sustainable farming.
“This vital funding means we can begin to programme and engineer plants at scale, creating and testing custom-built plant chromosomes to help crop resilience against disease and climate change and make crops more nutritious. This innovation has the potential to transform plant science, breeding and agriculture, allowing fast and large-scale improvements at genetic level, to support farmers and food security in the UK and worldwide,” said Professor Patrick Cai, Chair in Synthetic Genomics, Manchester Institute of Biotechnology.
The teams receiving funding in TA2 are led by:
• The University of Kent, which has been awarded £1.9 million, to focus on promoting meaningful and actionable public discussion on new technological development in plant synthetic genomics, aiming to foster responsible innovation and support a healthy research community.
• University of Edinburgh is awarded £1.8 million, to cultivate responsible innovation for plant synthetic genomics through experimental governance.
ARIA added that these two teams will work in close integration with teams working on TA1 to ensure that learnings can inform the ongoing technical work.
The latest awards cover two of ARIA’s five technical areas for the potato project. The other three technical areas are: Maintain: maintenance and replication of units within cells; Species Transferability: demonstrating units’ functionality in multiple crop species, including one monocot and one dicot; and Trait Complexity: successfully delivering agriculturally relevant complex traits using synthetic units.
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