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In the year 2000, Michael Elowitz and Stanislas Leibler published the first paper on a genetic circuit built in E. coli. A couple of years later, the first mammalian synthetic circuits emerged with work from Fussenegger in human cell lines.
Genetic engineers remained blind to plants until the late 2010s, when similar genetic engineering efforts started in the autotrophs. Long time scales, heterogeneous cell types, and high polyploidy are only some of the technical challenges of plant engineering.
Meanwhile, plants account for 80% of all biomass on Earth, they are our carbon capture machines by excellence, the original source of most pharmaceuticals in the world, and the basis of all of agriculture.
For startups and academic labs alike, the fact that plant (genetic) engineering lags ~15 years behind other organisms means that the ocean is blue, and a green field lies ahead.
When engineered, plants can serve as low-cost, natural bioreactors for pharmaceutical and cosmetic ingredients, for textiles and functional food… they can fix more carbon from the air and produce more food and, in some weird cases, they can even be turned into digital data storage devices and metal mining machines.
The following is a Biopunk Tour of the Brophy Lab in Stanford, where they are building new genetic engineering tools for plants and their associated microbes, towards a sustainable future. Their PI, Jennifer Brophy, famously built the first logic gates in plants during her postdoc, setting a precedent for the Brophytes 🌱.
PhD student Vivian Zhong and Postdoc Alexander Borowsky were kind enough to answer lots of questions about their current work, challenges and opportunities in industrial plant genetic engineering, under- and over-hyped plant biotechnologies, and societal challenges of engineered plants.
00:00 — Inside the plant incubator
00:36 — Vivian’s work to overcome random DNA integration
01:30 — Alex’s work controlling gene expression in plants
02:10 — The Brophy Lab’s mission
02:40 — Overhyped plant biotech
04:00 — Underhyped plant biotech
07:50 — Why you should consider doing plant genetic engineering
08:40 — Public Perception & communication about GMOs
11:30 — Lab Tour: Plant Transformation & Screening
14:30 — Microscopy: Visualizing edited plant cells
15:00 — Building gene constructs on Benchling
16:15 — Bioengineering: for what purpose?
17:10 — Futuristic plant biotechnologies
More Biopunk Tours of companies, research labs, and perhaps whole biotech cities could be possible — If you’re interested in supporting this content as a sponsor, drop me a line via LinkedIn, Twitter, a Substack comment or message, or by replying to this email!
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