CSIRO Agriculture and Food, PO Box 1600, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia.
CSIRO Agriculture and Food, PO Box 1600, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia.
Plant Sci. 2018 Aug;273:3-12. doi: 10.1016/j.plantsci.2018.03.035. Epub 2018 Apr 13.
Genetic improvement of crops started since the dawn of agriculture and has continuously evolved in parallel with emerging technological innovations. The use of genome engineering in crop improvement has already revolutionised modern agriculture in less than thirty years. Plant metabolic engineering is still at a development stage and faces several challenges, in particular with the time necessary to develop plant based solutions to bio-industrial demands. However the recent success of several metabolic engineering approaches applied to major crops are encouraging and the emerging field of plant synthetic biology offers new opportunities. Some pioneering studies have demonstrated that synthetic genetic circuits or orthogonal metabolic pathways can be introduced into plants to achieve a desired function. The combination of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology is expected to significantly accelerate crop improvement. A defining aspect of both fields is the design/build/test/learn cycle, or the use of iterative rounds of testing modifications to refine hypotheses and develop best solutions. Several technological and technical improvements are now available to make a better use of each design, build, test, and learn components of the cycle. All these advances should facilitate the rapid development of a wide variety of bio-products for a world in need of sustainable solutions.
作物的遗传改良始于农业时代的开端，并且一直在与新兴技术创新并行发展。在作物改良中使用基因组工程已经在不到三十年的时间里彻底改变了现代农业。植物代谢工程仍处于发展阶段，面临着许多挑战，特别是在开发基于植物的生物工业需求解决方案所需的时间方面。然而，最近应用于主要作物的几种代谢工程方法的成功令人鼓舞，植物合成生物学这一新兴领域提供了新的机会。一些开创性的研究表明，可以将合成遗传回路或正交代谢途径引入植物中以实现所需的功能。代谢工程和合成生物学的结合有望显著加速作物改良。这两个领域的一个重要特点是设计/构建/测试/学习循环，或使用迭代测试修改来完善假设并开发最佳解决方案的方法。现在有几种技术和技术改进可以更好地利用循环的每个设计、构建、测试和学习组件。所有这些进展都应该有助于快速开发出各种满足世界可持续解决方案需求的生物产品。
