Synthetic Biology to Endow Novel Sensing and Reporting Functions in Plants

Plant biotechnology has made great headway towards engineering plants for new agronomic functions, but precise gene expression of transgenes remains a challenge. Synthetic biology, which combines design and computational tools to create novel DNA sequence for engineering, holds the key to drastically improve the control of gene expression. The Center for Agricultural Synthetic Biology was recently founded to apply synthetic biology toward agricultural organisms. The presentation will focus on gains to produce novel plants to detect and report environmental contaminants. The key technological gain is design, building, and testing synthetic promoters in a high-throughput manner.