Our <i>long-term goal </i>is to create programmable plants in which we are able to dynamically control metabolism and phenotype so that user-defined functions can be turned on and off at will; this capacity would complement a growing set of tools that enable farmers to manage crop production in response to real-time environmental data, often called “digital agriculture” or “smart farming”. To help realize this long-term vision, this talk will showcase new inducible gene regulation modules and associated mathematical models of their function, which together will enable predictive control of gene expression in planta. Our approach builds on our previous success in re-engineering the plant stress hormone abscisic acid (ABA) sensing system so that it is controlled by a low cost agrochemical, which, in turn, enabled us to program plants so that their water use could be dynamically controlled by an agrochemical. ABA regulates a natural chemical induced dimerization (CID) module that has been extensively modified to create new chemical controlled functions. Here we show the use of advanced protein engineering strategies to modify the CID module’s interaction surface and ligand binding pocket and to create regulatory modules that can be controlled independently (orthogonally) of one another, enabling complex control operations. We show the use of a palette of exogenous chemicals can control plant function, including protein subcellular localization, activation of genome editing, and dynamic tuning of gene expression over a wide range of expression levels. The contributions of such advanced genetic tools for sustainable agriculture will be addressed.<br/> <br/>

User-defined chemical genetic systems for plants

2019 Spring National Meeting

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