About this Research Topic

Background

The food and energy crisis around the world have attracted intensive attention recently, and plant synthetic biology is emerging as an attractive solution to these problems. Plant synthetic biology combines plant biology and engineering principles to design and produce new devices or products that are inexpensive to produce and easy to scale up. While nature provides multiple plant chassises, more efficient processes are urgently required to improve plant systems for biomanufacturing. Additionally, the design of new metabolic pathways, advanced technologies or strategies in plant synthetic biology will increase the opportunity to meet various challenges.

Plant synthetic biology has gained great interest over the past decades as it is considered to be one of the motors of green biomanufacturing. Extensive efforts have been made to improve the plant synthetic biology strategy of Design-Build-Test-Learn, which shed light on the construction or modification of metabolism within plant chassis to improve green biomanufacturing systems, including natural products and recombinant proteins. The development of plant synthetic biology could facilitate both future agriculture for crop improvement and green biomanufacturing.

The development of plant synthetic biology still requires a long process in which both the complete understanding of underlying biosynthetic and regulation mechanisms remain to be explored. Efficient production of value-added products requires high adaptability between the metabolic pathway and the chassis, and multiple strategies, including artificial design, genetic modification, and multi-omics analysis, have been tried to address the above challenges. This Research Topic aims to cover the latest and novel research trends and approaches in plant chassis and their application in green biomanufacturing. We look forward to highlighting the basic principles of plant chassis selection, protein engineering, and the potential metabolic modification/development in plants to address the challenges.

The scope of this Research Topic is to highlight both the traditional and newly emerging plant chassis for biomanufacturing. We welcome submissions of Original Research and Review articles in all stages of plant synthetic biology, including but not limited to the following themes:
- Principles of plant chassis selection for biomanufacturing
- Metabolic pathway design, implementation, improvement
- Tools and method development for plant chassis
- Development of plant chassis suitable for different types of value-added natural products
- Efficient heterogeneous synthesis of natural products in plant chassis
- Efficient assimilation of CO2 and capture of renewable energy by plant chassis for bioproduction
- Synthetic metabolic pathways and synthetic genomes
- Methods for improving plant chassis through genome editing systems
- Technological developments in molecular biology for improving plant synthetic biology

Keywords: plant chassis, artificial pathway, rational design, natural products, recombinant protein

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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