Designing new-to-nature carbon fixing systems to improve crop productivity. Efforts to improve crop resource use and productivity are increasingly looking to integrate innovative synthetic biology sys

Description

Designing new-to-nature carbon fixing systems to improve crop productivity. Efforts to improve crop resource use and productivity are increasingly looking to integrate innovative synthetic biology systems. This includes aims to transplant genetically complex carbon concentrating mechanism components from cyanobacteria (carboxysomes) and algae (pyrenoids) to bolster crop photosynthesis, water and nitrogen use. Our simpler approach is to decipher how to precisely package synthetic pathways into encapsulins - self-assembling protein nanocages from bacteria - and convert them into carbon fixing nanoreactors suited to improving plant photosynthetic productivity. The genetic simplicity of this bio-inspired approach will aid the global efforts to deliver step change improvements in crop productivity and costs to growers.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3101 - Biochemistry and Cell Biology. Lead: A/Prof Yu Heng Lau