Breaking Ground Toward Plant Synthetic Biology

The 2017 Gordon Research Conference on Chloroplast Biotechnology will present and discuss cutting-edge research in all areas relevant to chloroplast genetic engineering, biotechnology and synthetic biology. The meeting is particularly timely in that it will bring together a growing community of scientists who combine fundamental studies on chloroplast gene expression and its regulation with the development of novel transgenic tools to engineer organellar genomes in plants and applications in agriculture, industrial biotechnology and the pharmaceutical sector. Leading experts will introduce novel approaches to chloroplast genome engineering and new tools for plastid gene manipulation and transgene expression. In addition, new applications in metabolic pathway engineering, resistance engineering and molecular farming will be presented. Target products to be covered include, for example, biopharmaceuticals (vaccines and therapeutic proteins), industrial enzymes, green chemicals and next-generation biofuels. The impact of organelle turnover, genome stability and plastid-nuclear interactions on chloroplast gene and transgene expression will be discussed. Sessions on plastid gene expression will address transcriptional and post-transcriptional control mechanisms of gene expression at all levels (transcription, RNA metabolism, translation, protein folding, protein turnover), highlighting bottlenecks and engineering options for optimized transgene expression. Moreover, possibilities to exploit nucleus-encoded, chloroplast-targeted regulator proteins for the precise control of plastid (trans)gene expression and chloroplast metabolism will be presented. The conference will also cover new synthetic biology approaches in cyanobacteria that are likely to stimulate future engineering efforts in chloroplasts of seed plants and eukaryotic algae. Due to its paramount importance for plant growth and agricultural productivity, photosynthesis will receive special attention. New strategies to improve carbon fixation by radical reengineering of the photosynthetic machinery as well as the design of novel metabolic pathways that harness photosynthetic electron transfer will be explored in cyanobacterial models, algae and crop plants.