Programmable Plants
ARIA Programmable Plants
Plants constantly juggle two jobs: growing and defending themselves. On farms, that balance can tip too far towards defence, which slows growth and lowers yields. Our ARIA-funded programmable plants seed grant will aim to engineer smart bacteria to act as messengers: they will sense conditions such as low nutrients, moderate drought, or disease, and produce hormones, nudging the plant so it prioritises growth when it's safe so to do. The project will focus on three key challenges in agriculture: 1) poor shoot growth when nitrate is low; 2) slow response to moderate drought; and 3) slow recovery after a pathogen is detected.
The project is led by a team at the University of Northumbria under Prof. Ciarán Kelly who focusses on the experimental implementation, while the University of Oxford team, led by Prof. Antonis Papachristodoulou with Dr Scott Stacey, uses mathematics and control engineering to design the synthetic gene circuits that will be built and tested by the experimental team.