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REVIEW article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Biotechnology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1526578
This article is part of the Research Topic From Genomics to Genome Editing: Crop Improvement Innovations for Farmers Worldwide View all 5 articles
Recent trends and advances in chloroplast engineering and transformation methods
Provisionally accepted
Muralikrishna Narra 1
Issei Nakazato 2
Brittany Polley 1
Shin-ichi Arimura 2
Grant N Woronuk 3
Pankaj Kumar Bhowmik 4*- 1 Aquatic and Crop Resource Development, National Research Council of Canada, Saskatoon, Canada
- 2 Graduate School of Agriculture and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
- 3 Relica Genomics, Highway 16 Township Road, 360 RR5 Site, 501 Comp 11,, Saskatoon, Canada
- 4 National Research Council Canada (NRC), Ottawa, Canada
Chloroplast transformation technology has become a powerful platform for generating plants that express foreign proteins of pharmaceutical and agricultural importance at high levels. Chloroplasts are often chosen as attractive targets for the introduction of new agronomic traits because they have their own genome and protein synthesis machinery. Certain valuable traits have been genetically engineered into plastid genomes to improve crop yield, nutritional quality, resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses, and the production of industrial enzymes and therapeutic proteins.Synthetic biology approaches aim to play an important role in expressing multiple genes through plastid engineering, without the risk of pleiotropic effects in transplastomic plants. Despite many promising laboratory-level successes, no transplastomic crop has been commercialized to date. This technology is mostly confined to model species in academic laboratories and needs to be expanded to other agronomically important crop species to capitalize on its significant commercial potential. However, in recent years, some transplastomic lines are progressing in field trials, offering hope that they will pass regulatory approval and enter the marketplace. This review provides a comprehensive summary of new and emerging technologies employed for plastid transformation and discusses key synthetic biology elements that are necessary for the construction of modern transformation vectors. It also focuses on various novel insights and challenges to overcome in chloroplast transformation.
Keywords: chloroplast transformation, SWNTs, CRISPR, Nanotechnology, RNAi, Biolistics, Synthetic Biology, Metabolic Engineering
Received: 12 Nov 2024; Accepted: 17 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Narra, Nakazato, Polley, Arimura, Woronuk and Bhowmik. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Pankaj Kumar Bhowmik, National Research Council Canada (NRC), Ottawa, Canada
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.