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Building a synbio toolbox to monitor and control plant hormone activity

Phytohormones are critical regulators of plant development and environmental responses. In the past three decades, the molecular pathways that govern hormone biosynthesis, signaling, and catabolism have been largely mapped out using a combination of genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, and cell biology approaches. Despite the major progress, our ability to monitor and precisely control hormone action remains limited. With the development of inexpensive DNA synthesis technologies and the rise of synthetic biology as a new discipline at the intersection of molecular genetics and engineering, new molecular tools can now be built to enable hormone tracking and targeted hormone manipulation. We have generated a synthetic biology toolbox that allows rapid construction of multi-hormone transcriptional reporters. In addition, we are building CRISPR-based logic gate devices to confer novel, highly restricted patterns of expression to any genes of interest using a limited set of available native and synthetic drivers.

Links & Resources

• An improved recombineering toolset for plants. Javier Brumos, Chengsong Zhao, Yan Gong, David Soriano, Arjun P Patel, Miguel A Perez-Amador, Anna N Stepanova, Jose M Alonso. Plant Cell. 32 (1), 100-122 (2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.19.0043


• Alonso-Stepanov Lab https://alonsostepanova.wordpress.ncsu.edu/

Guest Speaker

Anna Stepanova (@AlonsoStepanova and @ANStepanova45) is an Associate Professor of Plant Biology and Genetics at NC State University. Her primary research interests continue to center around plant hormones, specifically the mechanisms of ethylene signal transduction, auxin biosynthesis, hormone pathways’ crosstalk, and translational regulation of hormone responses. In her work, Anna is employing classical and molecular genetics, genomics and synthetic biology in Arabidopsis and tomato to decipher the mechanisms governing plant adaptation and phenotypic plasticity.

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