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Biologists Use Genetic Circuits to Program Plant Roots - Quanta Magazine
Sep 28, 2022 1 min, 43 secs
Synthetic biologists can now use genetic circuits to control the tendency of plant roots to grow horizontally or vertically.

A study published last month in Science created a kind of genetic circuit in plant roots, in effect programming how they grow.

Stanford University researchers, led by Jennifer Brophy, a bioengineer, and José Dinneny, a plant systems biologist, developed a genetic toolkit to control whether the root systems of two plant species grew more laterally or horizontally and how much the roots branched.

Their work confirms genetic models of plant growth and shows for the first time that it’s possible to program functional patterns of gene activity over time in specific tissues of complex organisms.

The new genetic toolkit should be very useful to other synthetic biologists in their own future experiments.

Although synthetic biologists have been inserting genetic control systems into bacteria and cultured complex cells for about two decades, technical issues have made it much harder for them to do this with complex multicellular organisms like plants.

Synthetic biologists often create the techniques and genetic elements they need as one-offs for specific organisms and experiments, but the Stanford team was more interested in assembling a general-purpose toolkit that can be adapted for different organisms as needed.

With this customizable toolkit, the researchers tailored genetic circuits to their specific organisms.

Control over the growth of root systems could be revolutionary for agriculture, especially in drought-stricken regions, where life may become more dire with ongoing climate change.

Crops could be programmed to grow shallow root systems to quickly soak up heavy but infrequent rains, or to send their roots straight down and keep them closely packed together to avoid infringing on a neighbor’s space.

In the roots, an “off” state was indicated by a complete root cap, a layer of cells on the tip of a root tendril that prevents further growth.

But the researchers observed that some roots in the “off” state only developed a partial root cap — enough to stop growth after a certain point, but not enough to prevent it altogether.

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