Narra Muralikrishna, Nakazato Issei, Polley Brittany, Arimura Shin-Ichi, Woronuk Grant N, Bhowmik Pankaj K
Aquatic and Crop Resource Development, National Research Council of Canada (NRC), Saskatoon, SK, Canada.
Graduate School of Agriculture and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
Front Plant Sci. 2025 Apr 17;16:1526578. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1526578. eCollection 2025.
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.
叶绿体转化技术已成为一个强大的平台，用于培育能够高水平表达具有医药和农业重要性的外源蛋白的植物。叶绿体常被选为引入新农艺性状的理想目标，因为它们拥有自己的基因组和蛋白质合成机制。某些有价值的性状已通过基因工程导入质体基因组，以提高作物产量、营养品质、对非生物和生物胁迫的抗性，以及工业酶和治疗性蛋白质的生产。合成生物学方法旨在通过质体工程在表达多个基因方面发挥重要作用，而不会在转基因植物中产生多效性效应的风险。尽管在实验室层面取得了许多有前景的成功，但迄今为止，还没有转基因作物实现商业化。这项技术大多局限于学术实验室中的模式物种，需要扩展到其他具有重要农艺价值的作物物种，以利用其巨大的商业潜力。然而，近年来，一些转基因品系正在进行田间试验，有望通过监管审批并进入市场。本综述全面总结了用于质体转化的新兴技术，并讨论了构建现代转化载体所需的关键合成生物学元件。它还聚焦于叶绿体转化中需要克服的各种新见解和挑战。
