https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2585-9340
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Andrew D. Hanson, Julian M. Hibberd, Mattheos A.G. Koffas, Joachim Kopka, Eleanore T. Wurtzel, Focus Issue Editorial: Synthetic Biology, Plant Physiology, Volume 179, Issue 3, March 2019, Pages 772–774, https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.19.00074
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Synthetic biology (SynBio) is a conceptual and operational revolution (Church et al., 2014) that’s coming soon to a branch of plant science near you, if it’s not there already (Liu and Stewart, 2015). The Synthetic Biology Focus Issue sets out to spread this disruptive news.
SynBio is a transformative combination of DNA technology, engineering principles, and computational tools that makes it possible to design new life processes and to repurpose existing natural ones for useful purposes (Purnick and Weiss, 2009). SynBio will profoundly impact and empower how plant science is done and how plant science is used to sustainably solve global problems. SynBio is already creating new jobs and is likely to keep doing this for decades (Delebecque and Philp, 2015).
SynBio is powerful for conceptual and operational reasons. The enormous conceptual power of SynBio is to open access to the vast “design space” that plants, and nature in general, have not explored (Bhatia et al., 2017). By discovering and deploying useful design space that evolution has “missed,” SynBio enables plants: to make familiar compounds by new pathways, and make new-to-nature compounds; to supply genes needed to make high-value compounds in microorganisms; to manipulate familiar morphological structures, and build totally new-to-nature ones; to respond in new ways to old stimuli, and sense and respond to totally new stimuli; and to be managed based on weather forecasts and other predictions that plants cannot make themselves.
