Abstract
Our society faces multiple daunting challenges including finding sustainable solutions towards climate change mitigation; efficient production of food, biofuels, and biomaterials; maximizing land-use efficiency; and enabling a sustainable bioeconomy. Plants can provide environmentally and economically sustainable solutions to these challenges due to their inherent capabilities for photosynthetic capture of atmospheric CO2, allocation of carbon to various organs and partitioning into various chemical forms, including contributions to total soil carbon. In order to enhance crop productivity and optimize chemistry simultaneously in the above- and belowground plant tissues, transformative biosystems design strategies are needed. Concerted research efforts will be required for accelerating the development of plant cultivars, genotypes, or varieties that are cooptimized in the contexts of biomass-derived fuels and/or materials aboveground and enhanced carbon sequestration belowground. Here, we briefly discuss significant knowledge gaps in our process understanding and the potential of synthetic biology in enabling advancements along the fundamental to applied research arc. Ultimately, a convergence of perspectives from academic, industrial, government, and consumer sectors will be needed to realize the potential merits of plant biosystems design for a carbon neutral bioeconomy.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 7914051 |
| Journal | BioDesign Research |
| Volume | 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2020 |
Funding
This research was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research, the Center for Bioenergy Innovation and Plant Microbe Interfaces projects. The Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is acknowledged for the opportunity to explore emerging role of synthetic biology in biomanufactur-ing and develop advanced functional genomics technologies. ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under contract no. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (https://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Center for Bioenergy Innovation and Plant Microbe Interfaces projects | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| Office of Science | |
| Biological and Environmental Research | |
| Oak Ridge National Laboratory | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |
