Engineering Plant Cell Cultures for Electro-Agriculture

Project Summary

Nearly half of the world’s habitable land is currently used for agriculture. With the global population expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, and the per capita consumption rising, we will need to increase food production by approximately 50% to address this demand. However, expanding agricultural land to meet this increase in demand is not a viable option due to competing pressures for space and the severe environmental consequences of land use change. Instead, we must find ways to produce significantly more food from the same amount of land.

One potential solution to this problem is electro-agriculture, which uses renewable energy to reduce CO₂ into simple carbon compounds that can serve as feedstocks for microbial or cellular food production. This approach enables food production to be decoupled from land use, allowing high-efficiency, low-footprint systems that bypass traditional farming.

To date, electro-agriculture has focussed primarily on microbes such as yeast or bacteria, as they are relatively easy to genetically engineer and culture. However, only products with fully understood metabolic pathways can be engineered into these systems – knowledge that can take decades to develop. In contrast, plants naturally encode the genetic information to produce many of the foods, oils, and products we consume today. If we could engineer plants and/or plant cells to grow efficiently on CO₂-derived feedstocks, we could then harness plant metabolism directly without the need for full pathway reconstruction in another system.

This project aims to pioneer new ways to support plant and/or plant cell growth on CO₂-derived feedstocks – overcoming biochemical and physiological limitations to lay the foundation for new ways of sustainable and scalable plant-based production. The PhD project can be tailored to the candidate’s interests, with opportunities to focus on one or more of the following key objectives:

• ‍Reprogramming plant metabolism for alternative feedstocks: Engineer plant cells to grow on simple carbon compounds produced via CO₂ reduction (e.g., acetate),enabling heterotrophic growth.‍
• Controlling plant cell morphology and growth: Identify and manipulate genetic regulators of plant cell morphology, such as cell size, clumping, and aggregation, to improve culture performance and scalability.

Potential Supervisors

• ‍Professor Steve Kelly (until a plant cell production group leader is hired)

Skills Recommended

• A strong background in molecular biology, synthetic biology, plant biology, or a related discipline.
• Experience with basic molecular biology techniques (e.g. cloning, PCR, transformation).
• Ability to work independently and as part of a collaborative research team.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Skills to be Developed

• Metabolic modelling and engineering
• CRISPR-based gene editing
• High throughput plant cell-based assays
• Cutting edge molecular and cell-based phenotyping
• Bioinformatics, transcriptomics and proteomics data analysis
• Written and oral scientific communication

UniversityDPhil Course(s) 

• DPhil in Biology

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