Journal of Experimental Botany, Vol. 65, No. 8, pp. 1927–1937, 2014
doi:10.1093/jxb/eru070 Advance Access publication 17 March, 2014
Review paper
Plant synthetic biology: a new platform for industrial
biotechnology
Elena Fesenko1 and Robert Edwards1,2,*
1 2 Food and Environment Research Agency, Sand Hutton, York, YO41 1LZ, UK
Centre for Novel Agricultural Products, Department of Biology, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected]
Received 27 November 2013; Revised 20 January 2014; Accepted 28 January 2014
Abstract
Thirty years after the production of the first generation of genetically modified plants we are now set to move into a
new era of recombinant crop technology through the application of synthetic biology to engineer new and complex
input and output traits. The use of synthetic biology technologies will represent more than incremental additions of
transgenes, but rather the directed design of completely new metabolic pathways, physiological traits, and developmental control strategies. The need to enhance our ability to improve crops through new engineering capability is
now increasingly pressing as we turn to plants not just for food, but as a source of renewable feedstocks for industry.
These accelerating and diversifying demands for new output traits coincide with a need to reduce inputs and improve
agricultural sustainability. Faced with such challenges, existing technologies will need to be supplemented with new
and far-more-directed approaches to turn valuable resources more efficiently into usable agricultural products. While
these objectives are challenging enough, the use of synthetic biology in crop improvement will face public acceptance issues as a legacy of genetically modified technologies in many countries. Here we review some of the potential
benefits of adopting synthetic biology approaches in improving plant input and output traits for their use as industrial
chemical feedstocks, as linked to the rapidly developing biorefining industry. Several promising technologies and
biotechnological targets are identified along with some of the key regulatory and societal challenges in the safe and
acceptable introduction of such technology.
Key words: Biofuels, biorefining, input traits, output traits, metabolic engineering, policy and regulatory frameworks.
Introduction
With their ability to directly utilize CO2 and sunlight to produce a diverse range of organic compounds, plants are an
obvious route to the sustainable generation of chemicals and
materials in the future. In 2007, the global annual consumption of oils was 4129 million tonnes, with 97% produced
from fossil reserves and only 3% from renewable resources
(Carlsson, 2009). While there is variance in the forecasts, it
is generally acknowledged that we have already reached the
peak of oil production and that future fossil carbon requirements will be increasingly met by increased coal abstraction
over the next half century (Maggio and Cacciola, 2012).
Plant biomass can be considered a direct replacement for
petrochemicals, from which all the essential chemicals can
be derived to sustain a modern industrialized society (Werpy
et al., 2004). This paradigm of using green rather than black
petrochemical feedstocks for industrial production is far from
new. Up to the beginning of the 20th century, global industrial economies were bio-based and fully reliant on natural
renewable resources. However, as mineral oils and natural gas
reserves were exploited, rapid advances in synthetic chemistry
and chemical engineering led to a displacement in of renewables in industrial processes (Lichtenthaler and Peters, 2004).
While modern industry remains wedded to fossil fuels, rising
prices, security of supply, and pollution and climate change
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1928 | Fesenko and Edwards
concerns have reawakened an interest in renewable plant
feedstocks.
The global scale of organic photosynthesis in plants is truly
staggering, with 105 billion tonnes of carbon fixed naturally
per annum, directly leading to the production of 210 billion
tonnes of biomass (Kircher, 2012). Agriculture accounts for
7% of the total fixed carbon, with the majority directed into
the synthesis of biopolymers, notably cellulose (40–55%),
hemicelluloses (10–35%), and lignin (18–41%). In contrast, a
smaller proportion of carbon flux is directed into non-fibrous
natural products such as oils, proteins, sugars, and secondary metabolites, most of which are destined for the food and
feed industries. These figures illustrate that, while plants are
highly efficient in fixing carbon, the major sinks are chemically limited in terms of their diversity and accessibility, being
in the form of insoluble polymers. To date, much plant biotechnological effort has been directed into making cell-wall
components more accessible to downstream processing and
hydrolysis to fermentable feedstocks (Vanholme et al., 2010).
Perhaps a more fertile line of research would be to fundamentally re-engineer plant physiology and metabolism to divert
just a small proportion of this fixed carbon into biopolymers
with the rest directed into a more diverse range of metabolites
which could be readily extracted and fed into existing chemical processing platforms.
To achieve the fundamental re-engineering of the primary metabolism of plants to render them better industrial
feedstocks may ultimately be achieved using conventional
approaches based on plant breeding or genetic modifications
of existing crops. To this end, while such a goal is achievable,
the route to its delivery will be long and torturous. Perhaps
instead we should now be considering using novel approaches
such as synthetic biology (SB) to construct new photosynthetic plant chasses (the SB term for the biological host which
is the subject of re-engineering; Bubela et al., 2012) that are
tailor made for the directed manufacture of specific chemicals and materials. While the latter proposition is clearly a
major challenge, the development of useful traits in existing
crops to meet future industrial needs is far from trivial. For
example, to maintain the plant oil supply to the food sector
and at the same time to replace 40% of fossil oils used by
the chemical industry renewable oil production will have to
triple in next 20 years, by a combination of both enhancing crop yield per hectare by 50% and by tripling oil content
per plant (Carlsson et al., 2011). In contrast, crops that have
been rationally re-engineered in form and metabolism using
SB-based approaches to divert as much fixed carbon as possible directly into industrial oils could require a much smaller
footprint in global agriculture and be less disruptive to food
supply chains.
Biotechnological targets for plant synthetic
biology: biorefining
A public dialogue around the development and applications
of SB clearly identified areas where there was consensus that
this was seen to be a useful emerging technology and where
there was concern, or even hostility, regarding its development and adoption (TNS-BMRB, 2010). A clear message
was the unease over using SB-based approaches to engineer
or process foods. Bearing this in mind, it would seem far
more sensible at this time to use the engineering principles
of SB to improve plants for industrial applications in preference to altering crops which are to be used in the food chain.
As a nascent technology, SB has a current focus on synthetic
genomics, metabolic pathway engineering, minimal genome
organism, protocells, and xenobiology. Typically these objectives are directed at engineering at the cellular or subcellular
level, typically using microbes as the chasses. Applications to
date have considered all major biotechnology sectors (Fig. 1).
With respect to green biotechnology, effort has tended to
focus on biofuels and biorefining, typically through improving microorganisms in their biotransformation of renewable
feedstocks into a range of energy and chemical products
(Connor and Atsumi, 2010).
The challenges of biorefining plants into chemicals using
current technologies illustrate the need for new approaches,
including SB (Jenkins et al., 2011). Thus, while significant
progress has been made in chemical and biochemical engineering, the full potential of using plants as feedstocks for
multiple chemical/material applications is fundamentally
hampered by having to use crops which have been not been
optimized for industrial applications. Major challenges
include:
(1) All major food crops have been selected for desirable
nutritional properties, which has resulted in a reduction
in the diversity of chemicals available for refining as compared with non-domesticated pro-genitor species.
(2) Useful chemicals that can be accessed through biorefining are often in limited quantities, difficult to isolate, and
contaminated with co-extractives which limit their efficient production.
(3) Natural chemicals are also different from many of the
synthetics commonly used as precursors and intermediates in industry. For example, natural chemicals have
broader distributions of mass, greater diversity of ring
systems, more chiral centres, more oxygen, and less nitrogen, sulphur, and halogen (Mitchell, 2011).
(4) Agricultural systems use a very small range of crops: in
addition to limiting the biochemical diversity available
to refine from, this also causes potential issues of plants
raised for non-food applications entering the food chain.
As a consequence of these challenges, at the moment biorefining uses a reductionist approach in which the biochemical
complexity of plant metabolism is reduced through chemical conversion or fermentation to a spectrum of compounds
similar to their petrochemical analogous (Edwards et al.,
2011). While this rendering down has obvious advantages in
allowing end products to directly feed into existing chemical
industries, it is inherently inefficient in thermodynamic terms
and does not play to the natural ability of the plant world
in generating useful chemical scaffolds. Plants are sources
of high-value natural products and produce a rich diversity
of secondary metabolites comprising of more than 200 000
Industrial biotechnology and plant synthetic biology | 1929
Fig. 1. Synthetic biology as a new biotechnology platform (sub-field definitions are adopted from the COGEM report (COGEM, 2013) (this figure is
available in colour at JXB online).
structures with a complexity that matches and in some cases
exceeds synthetic chemistry (Hartmann, 2007). Many plant
secondary metabolites are too complex for chemical synthesis, with their value as pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals,
or fine chemicals inversely proportional to their abundance.
This makes biomass fundamentally different from fossil
feedstocks because plants, unlike oils, contain valuable and
potentially labile entities within them which need to be isolated prior to degradative biorefining. As a result, plant SB
applied to biorefining faces a 2-fold challenge: optimizing the
technology to increase selectivity and efficiency, and improving yield and diversity of value-added products in industrial
plant biomass.
To date, the greatest success in deriving value from plants
using SB has been the engineering of microorganisms to
express their natural product pathways to produce pharmaceuticals, fine and bulk chemicals, and fuels through the
process of fermentation. One of the best-known examples of
such engineering is the production (up to 100 mg l–1) of the
sesquiterpenoid artemisinic acid in yeast, with the derived
compound artemisinin a major frontline drug used in the
treatment of malaria. Genes taken from the medicinal plant
Artemesia annua (the natural source of artemisinin) and
Escherichia coli were used to reprogramme the host’s metabolism to efficiently provide terpene precursors (Ro et al., 2006).
The approach developed to support large-scale artemisic acid
biogenesis was then adapted to produce other members of
the isoprenoid family, which represents some 50 000 different
types of molecules with a wide diversity of potential applications, including uses as pharmaceuticals, flavour and fragrance compounds, and fuels. By switching a single enzyme
in the artimisic acid biosynthesis pathway of the engineered
yeast, the associated pathway was switched from producing a pharmaceutical intermediate to the biofuel precursor
farnesene (Steen et al., 2010). Microbes have also been engineered using SB-based approaches for the consolidated bioprocessing of lignocellulosic biomass in a way that enzyme
generation, biomass hydrolysis, and biofuel production are
combined into a single organism. Such a consolidation strategy offers significant economic advantages over conventional
biorefinery processes where biomass is first treated with
hydrolytic enzymes, or chemicals, to release soluble fermentable sugars which can then be turned into biofuels through fermentation. Using such a consolidated approach, Escherichia
coli has been engineered to bioprocess lignocellulose plant
biomass into the advanced biofuels pinene, butanol, and fatty
acid ethyl ester (Bokinsky et al., 2011). While consolidated
processing of lignin components in plant biomass is still at an
early stage of research, current work on processing the carbohydrate component of the cell wall demonstrates the potential of synthetic biology in solving an important aspect of
the lignocellulosic bioprocessing challenge. Such approaches
1930 | Fesenko and Edwards
in engineering consolidated pathways will no doubt benefit
from the bottom-up refactoring of specialist microbes based
around minimal genomes to efficiently produce industrial
products (Schirmer et al., 2010).
The advances in SB directed towards creating tailor-made
microorganisms now point to similar approaches being
applied for the improvement of plants as a renewable feedstock. Clearly, the challenges of engineering plants using the
approaches adopted for manipulating microorganisms are
considerably more complex and to date there are no equivalents of standardized BioBricks to rapidly engineer eukaryotic
cells. There is, therefore, a need to invest in the underpinning
technology to develop research tools, which will enable the
industrial application of SB approaches in plants in the same
way that this emerging technology has by now demonstrated
its potential in yeasts and bacteria. However, there are already
established efficient methods for the routine genetic transformation of the majority of agricultural crops, including methods for engineering complex pathways using ‘gene stacking’
approaches (Halpin, 2005). Global agriculture is also now well
accustomed to the mass cultivation of transgenic plants with
170 million hectares currently dedicated to genetically modified crops (Marshall, 2013). With these objectives in mind, in
2008 the UK’s research councils funded the Synthetic Plant
Products for Industry Network (SPPI-Net) to accelerate the
development of plants for industrial biorefining applications.
The network identified four themes which should be prioritized to advance the improvement of plants for biorefining
though synthetic biology: (1) constructing synthetic signalling
pathways; (2) engineering metabolism through compartmentalization; (3) improving polysaccharide composition; and (4)
diversifying secondary metabolism (Jenkins et al., 2011).
Since the early use of SB will almost certainly be a transition from conventional genetic modification, it is useful
to review how transgenesis has been successfully used to
improve plants over the last 20 years. To date, genetic modification has largely been used to engineer input traits into
crops to drive greater yield efficiency and resilience in production. Notable examples include the development of Roundup
Ready glyphosate-resistant soybean and maize and Bacillus
thuringiensis-engineered cotton: advances that have revolutionized crop protection around the world. In contrast, the
engineering of output traits such as Golden rice and longlife tomatoes have had a more difficult route to market and
global acceptance. With respect to arable and horticultural
production, it would seem unlikely that SB will result in any
paradigm shift in consumer acceptance of engineered crops
destined for the food chain. Rather, the initial potential for
SB in plant biotechnological applications lies in engineering
input and output traits in non-food crops and potentially
even in generating wholly new plant varieties/species for specialized chemical and biomaterial production. Indeed, the
generation of specialist ‘industrial’ plants which can be separated from crops destined for the food chain at the point of
harvest and processing would seem to be a vital prerequisite
to fully realize the potential of genetic and SB engineering
of feedstocks for efficient biorefining and other industrial
applications. Some of the promising targets for SB-based
engineering of input and output traits are shown in Fig. 2,
with some recent interesting developments and advances discussed in the following sections.
Synthetic biology and input traits
As the most fundamental plant input trait, photosynthesis
itself has been identified as a target for SB re-engineering, based
on the maximal theoretical conversion efficiencies of solar
energy to biomass currently limited to 4.6 and 6% for C3 and
C4 plants, respectively (Zhu et al., 2008). Many research programmes have attempted to re-engineer photosynthetic pathways in C3 plants, using components taken from crassulacean
acid metabolism, or C4 pathways (e.g. phosphoenolpyruvate
decarboxylase, pyruvate orthophosphate dikinase, phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase, NADP-dependent malic
enzyme, NADP-dependent malate dehydrogenase), in an
attempt to improve energy-conversion efficiency (Rosgaard
et al., 2012). Alongside primary synthetic pathways, there has
also been considerable interest in enhancing carbon fixation
by re-engineering ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO). Approaches adopted include increasing
the rates of catalysis of carboxylation as well as reduction of
the oxygenation reaction catalysed by the enzyme, adjusting
its activation state, suppression of the oxygenase reaction by
increasing the localized concentration of CO2, and development of the natural regeneration phase of the Calvin cycle
(Ducat and Silver, 2012). In another approach, the location of
the genes encoding the subunits of RuBisCo (rbcL and RbcS)
have been consolidated by applying a synthetic fusion strategy (Whitney et al., 2009). Overall, these studies have shown
the difficulties in improving the carbon-fixation characteristics of RuBisCO in isolation. As an alternative approach,
other carboxylating enzymes have been considered to drive
photosynthesis. Using a computational approach to evaluate alternative routes to carbon fixation, 5000 carboxylating
pathways identified from a Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes
and Genomes analysis were compared in terms of maximal
fixation activity, NADPH and ATP consumption, and thermodynamic and topological capability. Intriguingly, a novel
variant of the C4 pathway was identified, which was modelled as supporting a 3-fold-enhanced CO2-fixing capability
for phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase (Bar-Even et al., 2010).
This interesting piece of work points to a new and powerful
approach to re-engineer photosynthesis based on fundamental chemical principles applied through SB technology.
Continuing on the theme of engineering primary inputs to
plant growth, nitrogen fixation is also now seen as a target for
SB engineering, not in the least because of the cost and environmental footprint of using chemical fertilizers. Recently
considerable progress has been made in understanding the
signalling events underpinning the formation of N2-fixing
nodules, so that this trait may ultimately be transferred to
non-legume crops (Oldroyd and Dixon, 2014). In addition to
the classic N-fixing Rhizobium species involved in nodulation,
attention is also being directed to other N-fixing prokaryotes
belonging to the Azospirillum, Klebsiella, and Frankia genera.
Industrial biotechnology and plant synthetic biology | 1931
Fig. 2. Drivers for developing new synthetic plant traits (this figure is available in colour at JXB online).
In terms of generating new tools for engineering N-fixing
pathways, a ‘refactoring’ methodology has been developed
in Klebsiella oxytoca allowing complete control over all of
the functions encoded by the 20-gene cluster responsible for
reducing atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. Even though
the synthetic cluster showed only 0.3% of the activity of the
most closely related naturally evolved pathway, this research
has demonstrated the potential of SB to re-engineer the complex biology that underpins the N-cycle (Temme et al., 2012).
In addition to nutrient input traits, SB has the potential
to provide crop science with new traits to offset the increasing diversity of abiotic (environment), biotic (pathogens, herbivores), and xenobiotic (pollutants) stress which are now
affecting agriculture. In particular, SB could provide a route
to greater resilience in agriculture faced with an increasingly
extreme and variable climate and associated pressures resulting from invasive pests and diseases. Two major SB strategies
could be envisaged being deployed: one involving engineering
the stress response systems themselves and the other reprogramming of associated signalling networks. As a logical
extension, such synthetic signalling and defence networks
would ultimately be used in combination to provide new
defence mechanisms which may not have yet evolved in any
single plant. Recent papers have suggested the potential utility
of such approaches. For example, the transfer of the electronshuttling flavoprotein flavodoxin from the cyanobacterium
Anabaena into the plastids of tobacco to functionally replace
the host’s ferredoxin carrier protein rendered the transgenic plants more stress tolerant (Zurbriggen et al., 2008).
Similarly, an SB approach has been applied to use mitogenactivated protein-kinase signalling modules to reprogramme
a range cellular and physiological responses (Šamajová et al.,
2013). The ability to precisely engineer plant genomes with
the aid of synthetic site-specific nucleases has recently been
shown to be very successful in designing plants tolerant to
biotic and abiotic stresses (Kathiria and Eudes, 2014). These
site-specific ‘genome editing’ advanced techniques include
transcription activator-like effector nucleases and zinc-finger
nucleases. Applications include the selective engineering of
resistance to Xanthomonas oryzae in rice (Li et al., 2012) and
tolerance to imidazolinone and sulphonylurea herbicides in
tobacco (Townsend et al., 2009). These tools are also proving
useful in generating designer genomes for further metabolic
engineering, as demonstrated by the introduction of regularly
interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) in rice and
wheat (Shan et al., 2013).
Synthetic biology and output traits
Output traits of interest to biorefining applications include
the rational construction of crops that produce high yields
1932 | Fesenko and Edwards
of useful intermediates, which can then be readily used by
existing chemical industries, requiring lower inputs of energy
and materials in their processing and also with a usable set of
byproducts to facilitate the move towards zero waste refining.
The latter is an important point when introducing a disruptive technology in competition to the well-established and
highly efficient oil-refining industry. As discussed earlier, these
overall goals in producing ‘process-ready’ industrial crops
effectively means diverting an increasing proportion of plant
metabolism away from lignocellulose production into soluble,
or readily extractable, primary and secondary metabolites.
In terms of understanding the potential for diverting C into
alternative sinks, a metabolic flux analysis had shown that,
during steady plant growth, 80–85% of carbon is directed into
sugar biosynthetic pathways (predominantly into cell-wall
biosynthesis), along with smaller proportions diverted into
the production of soluble polysaccharide and nucleic acids.
Of the remaining total C-flux, 10 and 5% carbon are used
in fatty acid and terpenoid biosynthetic pathways, respectively, mostly in the synthesis of essential membrane and
photosynthetic components (Melis, 2013). The SB approach
to be adopted should, therefore, be a push–pull strategy by
which the sink represented by carbohydrate synthesis directed
into the cell wall is reduced, thus enabling a new need for the
released flux relating to industrial intermediate formation.
With respect to generating the ‘push’, to release more carbon into industrially useful primary metabolism would point
to the directed re-engineering of the plant cell wall such that
its essential structural and defensive roles are not compromised, while requiring less commitment in metabolic input.
To date, attempts to remodel the cell wall have centred on
improving the extractability and saccharification of cellulose
from plants by conventional genetic modification of cell-wall
composition. Approaches have concentrated on regulating monolignol biosynthetic genes, which ultimately control
lignin content and composition and, in several instances, have
led to deleterious phenotypes such as dwarfing, vascular collapse, or other abnormalities presumably caused by changes
in cell-wall rigidity (Bonawitz and Chapple, 2013). To overcome this, Loqué and colleagues have recently reported using
a systematic SB approach to decrease total lignin content
in Arabidopsis cell walls, while maintaining the integrity of
the vascular vessels (Yang et al., 2013). This was achieved by
effectively reprogramming the metabolic network responsible
for lignification through changing promoter-coding sequence
associations and in doing so creating an artificial positive
feedback loop (APFL) to enhance secondary cell-wall biosynthesis in very specific tissues. The first stage included a
replacement of the promoter of the key gene, cinnamic acid
4-hydroxylase, with the vascular-vessel-specific promoter
which is regulated by the transcription factor VND6. This
lead to lignin biosynthesis relating to vessel formation being
disconnected from the less-specific cell-fibre regulatory network. The second stage involved creating an APFL by using
the promoter of the IRX8 gene, which encodes a glycosyltransferase essential for secondary wall synthesis, to express
a new copy of the fibre transcription factor NST1. This
two-stage modification resulted in enhanced polysaccharide
deposition without excessive lignification. This directed
approach showed promise as a means of further ‘pushing’
metabolic flux from the cell wall and into other potentially
more useful pathways.
To create the metabolic ‘pull’ for industrial product formation, one emerging approach is to coordinately introduce a set
of specific enzymes to interface directly with the Calvin cycle
such that related metabolic intermediates, such as 3-phosphoglycerate, glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate, and fructose-1,6-bisphosphate, can be converted into industrial intermediates.
An introduction of such ectopic branch points into novel
sinks has the potential to increase the flux of output carbon
from the cycle and enhance overall photosynthetic efficiency
and, if designed effectively, could minimize the normal flux
distribution of fixed carbon in cells (Ducat et al., 2012).
Initially the concept has been proven using the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942, engineered to produce the industrial intermediate 1,2-propanediol synthesis
from CO2 by building an NADPH-dependent pathway channelling the Calvin cycle intermediate dihydroxyacetone phosphate, with optimal yields of 150 mg l–1 of the diol obtained
(Li and Liao, 2013). It has also been proposed to link photosynthesis directly to introduce a synthetic pathway to butanol
production (Lee, 2013) by direct coupling to the Calvin cycle
to facilitate synthesis of this valuable biofuel and industrial
intermediate (Fig. 3).
With respect to higher-value metabolic pathways, one of
the more promising areas to apply SB in the immediate term
lies in the engineering of secondary metabolism, with many of
the required technologies already established in microorganisms. One of the more successful strategies adopted to date
has consisted of producing a novel chemical scaffold formed
through a core biosynthetic pathway and then allowing the
new intermediate to be modified by the host cell to a series
of new endproducts. Such an approach is compatible with
all the major groups of plant natural products (polyketides,
phenolics, alkaloids, terpenoids), with a notable example
being the generation of novel biomedicinal tropane alkaloids
based on the expression of a mutated scaffolding enzyme,
strictosidine synthase (Runguphan and O’Connor, 2009). In
terms of engineering other premium plant pathways, another
interesting approach has been to use SB to directly link lightdriven oxidoreductive chemistry to reactions catalysed by the
haeme-containing cytochrome P450s (Jensen and Møller,
2010). The strategy adopted has involved the direct coupling
of the electron transport of photosystem I (PSI) to P450catalysed monooxygenation, in place of the reducing potential provided by NADPH via cytochrome P450 reductase. In
plant cells, the membrane-bound P450s are typically localized in the endoplasmic reticulum in the cytoplasm, while PSI
operates in the stromal lamellae of the chloroplasts. Through
colocalization of the two pathways and the concerted re-engineering of electron transport carriers, the research group at
University of Copenhagen is currently working on coupling
PSI directly to a cytochrome P450 to develop a system in
which oxidative catalysis is driven directly by the energy of
solar light. They showed the possibility of combining biosynthetic pathways in vitro as well as in vivo, reassembling and
Industrial biotechnology and plant synthetic biology | 1933
Fig. 3. The engineering of plant metabolism to generate synthetic intermediates: proposed redirection of the Calvin cycle to interface with synthetic
pathways leading to production of 1,2-propanediol (A; Li and Liao, 2013) and butanol (B; Lee, 2013).
configuring new biosynthetic systems which do not exist in
nature (Jensen et al., 2012).
In addition to using SB to engineer industrial products,
another useful output trait which has been the focus of
this technology relates to using plants in new biomonitoring applications to detect chemicals (e.g. pollutants, explosives) or pathogens as well as bioremediators. Plants have
an innate ability to continuously sense and respond to the
environment using signal transduction systems based on the
recognition of small molecules. By introducing new sensor
or reporter systems, these responsive signalling networks
can be adapted using SB to provide new functionalities for
sophisticated and low-cost applications in environmental
detection. For example, it has been possible to computationally redesign periplasmic binding proteins which have
a capacity to detect virtually any compound, including synthetic compounds such as explosives and pollutants, and
then couple this recognition to histidine kinase-mediated
signalling pathways that control the expression of reporter
genes. For example, a synthetic degreening circuit that produced rapid chlorophyll loss upon presence of a specific
input was constructed, which showed visible bleaching
within 2 h after signal perception (Antunes et al., 2006).
These first prototype detector plants have the potential to
detect foreign compounds in soil as well as in air, allowing
their potential use in a variety of remediation and security
applications (Antunes et al., 2011).
Regulating the translation of synthetic
biology innovations from laboratory to field
While the potential applications of ‘full-blown’ synthetic biology approaches in plant improvement are currently speculative, extreme genetic engineering and much of the technology
required to deliver it already exist. Even though plant synthetic biology is still at the blue-sky stage, it is important to
develop essential regulatory frameworks now if the technology is to be commercialized in the foreseeable future. On
performing a SWOT (strengths-weaknesses-opportunitiesthreats) analysis of using synthetic biology to improve plants
as renewable feedstocks (Table 1), it is clear that alongside
technological and economic challenges, there are both societal and political obstacles to be overcome. In Europe, several
non-governmental organizations have already identified synthetic biology as a threat to food security and sustainability,
and these concerns will need to be carefully considered and
the risks versus benefits of moving from the conventional to
the novel (i.e. synthetic) plant biomass platform need to be
assessed. In particular, while an individual organism can be
precisely engineered to exhibit new traits under conditions of
containment, their behaviour in a more chaotic natural environment may be less predictable. As such, both the scientific
and business communities have to take safety, security, ethics,
and public perception into consideration and work together
with governmental and non-governmental organizations to
realize the potential and mitigate risks of any emerging technology. There is no doubt that biotechnology, either white or
green, that uses SB-based approaches has to be tightly regulated. The question is whether there is the need for a related
dedicated regulatory framework or, rather, whether the existing regulations can be adapted to cover SB-developed traits.
There are three grounding principles of regulatory responses
to new technologies (Bubela et al., 2012):
(1) Proportionality: a proportional balance of risks to health
and the environment against and potential commercial
benefits of research and novel technologies.
(2) Distributive justice: an equitable distribution of benefits
and burdens.
1934 | Fesenko and Edwards
Table 1. Plants as feedstocks for the post-petroleum economy: SWOT analysis
Strengths
Weaknesses
Usage of abundant sunlight, CO2, and H2O to produce a range of
products (food, feed, materials, chemicals) and energy (fuels, power and/
or heat) (i.e. novel feedstocks)
Sustainable, renewable resources for the post-petroleum economy
‘Public good’ concept
Economic and environmental advantages
Limited plant yields
Opportunities
Threats
New plant traits
Integration into the existing industrial infrastructure
Novel applications (e.g. bioremediation, biosensors)
Frontier research
Land availability: food vs. non-food
Regulatory frameworks (e.g. genetically modified)
Public perception
Ethical issues
Biodiversity
Biosecurity and biosafety
Intellectual property
(3)Procedural justice: considering beneficiaries alongside
those who will be adversely affected.
If we take the view that SB-derived organisms are a logical extension of genetically modified organisms, such novel
microorganisms and plants with synthetic traits, are already
controlled by a set of established regulations (Murphy and
Yanacopulos, 2005). Even though the frameworks are significantly different in the EU and USA, robust methodologies
for assessing the risks of genetically modified organisms are
already in place, with many issues on biosafety, biosecurity,
and ethics having been already addressed during the last decades. Instead of rewriting new policies and regulations, it
has been suggested that similarities and differences between
genetically modified and synthetic organisms need to be identified and more emphasis placed on addressing safety and
security challenges unique to SB (Schmidt and de Lorenzo,
2012). If SB-derived organisms with synthetic traits can be
contained in a controlled environment, the current regulation
framework should be adequate. If, however, there is a possibility them entering the food chain, precautionary principals
should be considered and methods of risk assessment have to
be reviewed, adjusted and embedded into the existing regulations (Fig. 4). To date, the UK Health and Safety Executive
had assessed current and future needs for the SB regulatory
framework in Great Britain (Health and Safety Laboratory,
2012) and concluded that the current genetically modified
organism framework adequately covers present and near
future innovations in the field.
The other major consideration for synthetic biology
applications is potential adverse public perception linked
to ethical and intellectual property issues (i.e. fear of the
fear of the public). As in the case with genetically modified organisms in the EU, public opinion could play a major
role in hampering the development and commercialization
of SB-technology. In the case of genetically modified organisms, this has led to product release and use being restricted
Biotic, abiotic, xenobiotic stress sensitive
Low refinery conversions
Seasonal
Variable contents and low density of biomass
Inadequate knowledge and evidence of long-term impacts of genetically
modified plants
in Europe, but it has not stopped the uptake of this technology in much of the rest of the world. In 2012, the Friends
of the Earth released the first global declaration from an
non-governmental organization on the development of SB
technologies entitled ‘The Principles for the Oversight of
Synthetic Biology’, where they proposed applying the precautionary principle to synthetic biology applications (i.e.
a total ban on any attempt to change the human genome
and a moratorium on a release or commercial use of synthetic organisms, cells, and genomes, until regulatory bodies
have considered the risks). For their part, the UK’s research
councils conducted a synthetic biology dialogue where scientists, policy makers, stakeholders, and the general public
were encouraged to break down barriers of misunderstanding and develop a cohesive national strategy in the field
of synthetic biology (UK Synthetic Biology Roadmap
Coordination Group, 2012). The outcomes of the dialogue
provided evidence thatm while the use of SB was supported
across the board for some applications (i.e. medical and
energy), others, notably applications in the engineering of
food, crops, and bioremediation, raised several concerns,
pointing to legacy issues from earlier experience of the
genetic modification debate.
Future perspectives
Alongside emerging technology challenges, plant synthetic
biology has to deal with the genetic modification legacy, which
could easily derail attempts to develop this powerful technology to improve crops and their utilization for food and nonfood applications. It is therefore imperative to apply a cautious
step-by-step approach in developing SB applications for plant
engineering, starting from simple systems, learning from them,
then reiteratively further developing the technology based on
evidence underpinned by sound knowledge, skills, and expertise. By drawing together white and green biotechnology, we
Industrial biotechnology and plant synthetic biology | 1935
Fig. 4. Possible adaptation of genetic modification regulations to synthetic biology processes and products (this figure is available in colour at JXB online).
propose that biorefining offers an excellent learning ground
for an initial assessment of synthetic biology applications.
In order to make plant biomass a fully viable alternative
to petrochemical feedstocks, a long-term research and development programme aimed at improving their utilization for
non-food uses needs to be initiated. Biorefining that utilizes
conventional plant biomass and is developed in response to
economic and environmental challenges, endorsed by public
opinion, and supported through significant incentives provided
by government offers a first step in the process (Fig. 5). It would
then be envisaged that process optimization could be achieved
by applying recent advances in plant and microbial biotechnology, using an incremental process which takes due account of
environmental and socioeconomic concerns (e.g. crops-for-food
vs. crops-for-fuel conflicts. To move from industries which are
largely based on chemistry to those that adopt biotechnology
to drive similarly efficient production processes will ultimately
require the generation of microbial and plant systems which
have been selectively re-engineered based on synthetic genomes.
As such, it is most likely that first commercial applications of
SB will be seen in the generation of synthetic microorganisms
to significantly enhance selectivity and efficiency of biorefining.
In developing such designer biotransforming organisms,
it will be imperative to initiate related, but independent,
‘public-good’ research into safe containment and biosecurity
issues. If this is not done, a fledgling industry will put itself
into an exposed position in the event of even minor breaches
of containment. From these early studies on microbial biotransformation technologies, we will be able to gain knowledge and credibility in extending the technology to the greater
prize of improving plants using SB approaches. Without a
paradigm shift in plant productivity, it would be implausible
for industry to switch increasingly to renewable feedstocks,
while agriculture is still expected to feed a growing world population. Thus, any emerging biorefining industry will have to
work within limits of plant productivity which are compatible
with maintaining secure food supplies, while targeting output
traits for improvements to increase the yield of valuable components and the efficiency with which these can be extracted
from plants.
As this review has highlighted, while there are major challenges, the size of the prize is great, and with the increased
global interest in agritechnological research, this review
argues that basic research programmes in plant SB should
now be initiated with a view to bringing the related technologies into translation over the next two decades, when food
and energy/industry needs will require the large-scale introduction of new safe technologies.
1936 | Fesenko and Edwards
Fig. 5. Applications of synthetic biology in biotechnology (this figure is available in colour at JXB online).
Disclaimer
The paper contents, including any opinions and/or conclusions expressed, are those of the authors alone and do not
necessarily reflect Defra policy.
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