Plant Programming

Plant Bioengineering Hub (PBH)

Enabling versatile, precise, and tractable approaches for plant bioengineering that will benefit CROPPS and the broader plant research community.

Lead: Joyce Van Eck

Senior Personnel: Chris Alabi, Giulia Guidi, Sarah Hind, Matt Hudson, Georg Jander, Jose Martinez, Chris Ober

The Plant Bioengineering Hub (PBH) is a collaborative platform of plant biologists and engineers inventing state-of-the-art technologies to alleviate the current bottlenecks that stymie plant bioengineering. The overarching goal of the PBH is development of strategies for scalable plant bioengineering to be realized to meet not only the mission of CROPPS, but also for the broader needs of plant research and crop improvement. To help meet the mission of CROPPS, the members of the PBH are fully engaged with the iTOC and DEEPFIND Learning Labs to advance their efforts according to a realistic timeframe to meet their goals. Keeping to the timeframe requires multi-gene targets to overcome the challenge of affecting traits across populations for there to be impact for the goals of CROPPS.

In our work, we will pursue the following objectives:

  • Building capacity for plant bioengineering with robotics, automation, computation, and synthetic biology: automation that significantly reduces the labor required, improves precision, and significantly increases the capacity for plant bioengineering.
  • Advancing nanomaterials for efficient gene delivery into plant cells: increased cell delivery efficiency with nanomaterials compared to current methods for plant bioengineering.
  • Adoption of new plant bioengineering approaches for CROPPS crops: efficient methods to allow generation of stably modified lines of tomato, maize, and cotton.