Sofia Sanchez

🌱 🧬 Plant (genetic) engineering lags ~15 years behind other organisms... While the first genetic circuits were built in bacteria in the year 2000, and mammalian circuits followed a couple of years after, it was only until the late 2010s that similar genetic engineering efforts started in plants. However, plants account for 80% of all biomass on Earth, they are our carbon capture machines by excellence, the original source of most pharmaceuticals in the world, and the basis of all of agriculture. When engineered, they can serve as low-cost, natural bioreactors for pharmaceutical and cosmetic ingredients, for textiles and functional food… they can fix more carbon from the air and produce more food and, in some weird cases, they can even be turned into digital data storage devices and metal mining machines. The following is a 20-min Biopunk Tour of the Brophy Lab in Stanford Synthetic Biology, where they are building new genetic engineering tools for plants and their associated microbes, towards a sustainable future. Their PI, Jennifer Brophy, famously built the first logic gates in plants during her postdoc, setting a precedent for the Brophytes 🌱. PhD student Vivian Zhong and Postdoc Alexander Borowsky were kind enough to answer lots of questions about their current work, challenges and opportunities in industrial plant genetic engineering, under- and over-hyped plant biotechnologies, and societal challenges of engineered plants. Full video in thread 🤠