Plants as Plants: natural factories producing fuel, plastic, flavoring, and more

Welcome, to the Penn State iGEM wiki page! This year our team took on the challenge of working with plants. Through several projects we hope to help characterize key plant parts and demonstrate the ability of plants to be used as natural factories. Below you will find a short description of our projects, for more information please refer to the "Projects" page linked on the left of the screen.

Team Abstract

Plants as Plants: Natural Factories provides a green approach to the manufacturing of valuable chemicals and materials. Through synthetic biology, we are able to control the expression of genes that regulate the production of desired secondary metabolites. Via the manipulation of established metabolic pathways, we hope to produce vanillin and butanol. The prospect of being able to synthetically produce a biofuel provides vast possibilities for the scope of synthetic biology and green energy. Additionally through the manipulation of the cellulose synthase genes, we hope to increase the biomass of plants by a hybrid plant cell wall. As shown through these projects, the use of plants provides various green energy possibilities. However, due to the limited use of plants within synthetic biology there are various regulation issues. Thus we have additionally worked on characterizing a range of plant promoters as well as introducing the Cas9 crisper system into plants.