A world-first effort to build an artificial chromosome entirely from scratch in plants has received more than $12 million in funding from the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) through its Synthetic Plants program.
An international team of researchers, including Professor Ryan Lister and Dr James Lloyd from The University of Western Australia and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space, will join collaborators from the University of Cambridge, biotech company Phytoform Labs and the Australian Genome Foundry at Macquarie University, to pioneer technologies to design, build and install synthetic chromosomes in plants.
The project will use the moss Physcomitrium patens – a unique, highly engineerable plant – as a development platform to build and test a bottom-up synthetic chromosome, before transferring it into potato plants.
Professor Lister said the synthetic chromosome would contain key genetic elements including synthetic centromeres and telomeres, and was designed to function as an independent, inheritable unit within the plant's cells.
"This project is pushing the frontier of synthetic biology in plants," Professor Lister said.
"For the first time, we're not just editing DNA, we're attempting to write entire chromosomes from the ground up."
"If successful, it will unlock powerful new ways to give crops complex new traits such as improved resilience, productivity, or the ability to produce useful materials."
Dr Lloyd said the research marked a major leap in plant synthetic biology.
"While synthetic chromosomes have been achieved in yeast and mammalian cells, this will be the first attempt to create and deploy one entirely from scratch in a plant," Dr Lloyd said.
"While it's been getting cheaper and easier to read genomes, here we want to push the bounds of writing genomes, enabling us to confer favourable traits to crops, such as climate resilience."
ARIA's Synthetic Plants program, led by Programme Director Angie Burnett, supports ambitious, high-risk research to enable fully synthetic plant genomes in the future.
Professor Ryan said the project delivered on ARIA's vision to push the boundaries of what's possible through bold scientific innovation.
