Metabolic Engineering in Plants: Discovery and Design for Sustainable Bioproduction

Plant metabolism is central to human life on Earth, not only as caloric sustenance but also as the source of medicines, materials, and high-value chemicals. This meeting will focus on the genetics, biochemistry, and network interactions of plant metabolism which give insight to the manipulation of plants to make useful products. The GRS will focus on advances made by early career scientists in the area of pathway discovery, gene regulation, and technology development. In particular, we will explore how to adapt existing engineering paradigms to address large amounts of next-generation sequencing data and incorporate new advances in synthetic biology and genome engineering. Finally, a panel of accomplished professionals from academia, publishing, and industry will share their experiences with emerging directions in plant metabolic engineering with a particular focus on industrial success; these dialogues should provide useful insight for younger scientists who will become the next generation of plant scientist-engineers.