Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BOTANY
Volume 65, Issue 8, Pages 1927-1937Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/jxb/eru070
Keywords
Biofuels; biorefining; input traits; output traits; metabolic engineering; policy and regulatory frameworks
Categories
Funding
- BBSRC [BB/I005358/1, BB/I005358/2] Funding Source: UKRI
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council [BB/I005358/1, BB/I005358/2] Funding Source: researchfish
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council [BB/I005358/1, BB/I005358/2] Funding Source: Medline
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Thirty years after the production of the first generation of genetically modified plants we are now set to move into a new era of recombinant crop technology through the application of synthetic biology to engineer new and complex input and output traits. The use of synthetic biology technologies will represent more than incremental additions of transgenes, but rather the directed design of completely new metabolic pathways, physiological traits, and developmental control strategies. The need to enhance our ability to improve crops through new engineering capability is now increasingly pressing as we turn to plants not just for food, but as a source of renewable feedstocks for industry. These accelerating and diversifying demands for new output traits coincide with a need to reduce inputs and improve agricultural sustainability. Faced with such challenges, existing technologies will need to be supplemented with new and far-more-directed approaches to turn valuable resources more efficiently into usable agricultural products. While these objectives are challenging enough, the use of synthetic biology in crop improvement will face public acceptance issues as a legacy of genetically modified technologies in many countries. Here we review some of the potential benefits of adopting synthetic biology approaches in improving plant input and output traits for their use as industrial chemical feedstocks, as linked to the rapidly developing biorefining industry. Several promising technologies and biotechnological targets are identified along with some of the key regulatory and societal challenges in the safe and acceptable introduction of such technology.
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