The Dudley lab will be researching sustainable production of useful biomolecules with a particular focus on cell-free and plant synthetic biology.
Synthetic biology endeavours to apply principles of abstraction, modularity, and standardization to engineer organisms for useful purposes. Plants produce an incredible diversity of complex metabolites useful to humans as fragrances, insecticides, bioactives, and medicines and one can imagine a distributed manufacturing system where seeds encode the blueprints for low-capital bioreactors made from light and carbon dioxide. Thus, plants could be a “next frontier” for synthetic biology with potential to play a key role in reshaping agriculture and the bioeconomy to respond to challenges of the 21st century.
However, the plant engineering field to date is limited by slow experimental workflows for testing metabolic pathways, lack of well-characterized parts for gene expression, and limited knowledge of plant secondary metabolism/regulation. The Dudley Lab endeavors to address these challenges via multiple approaches including aims to
- accelerate metabolic pathway discovery and design-build-test cycles using cell-free techniques for protein synthesis and metabolic pathway reconstitution.
- expand the toolbox of DNA sequences for controlling plant gene expression and metabolism via inducible promoters, multi-unit genetic switches, and feedback control
- use synthetic biology as a tool for understanding plant biology with CRISPR-based genome engineering, untargeted metabolomics, and next-generation sequencing as a techniques for elucidating regulatory networks and perturbing/controlling/understanding core and secondary metabolism.
