Plant Cell Reports - Topical Collection: Plant Synthetic Biology
Topical Collection: Plant Synthetic Biology
Guest editors: Scott C. Lenaghan, Alessandro Occhialini, & C Neal Stewart, Jr. Center for Agricultural Synthetic Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA
Submissions due 29 February, 2024
The rapidly expanding field of plant synthetic biology holds significant potential to address the needs of a rapidly changing environment. From climate-resilient crops, to the production of nutrient dense foods, to plants as biosensors, there is no shortage of agricultural problems for which synthetic biology has been envisioned to play a role. Synthetic biology uniquely melds computational science, engineering, and biology to inform design-build-test (DBT) cycles to rapidly speed the development of molecular devices. With regards to plant synthetic biology, the current bottleneck lies in the ability to rapidly conduct DBT cycles, which significantly delays progress in the development of complex circuits and controllers. As such, creative strategies and solutions must be sought to increase the throughput in plant DBT cycles to bring the plant synthetic biology community up to speed with their prokaryotic and mammalian counterparts. In addition, the creation of orthogonal switches, parts libraries, databases, and computational tools are necessary to mine the most information from currently existing plant systems. As such, this topical collection seeks to highlight significant advances in plant synthetic biology to push the current state-of-the-art for plant synthetic biology.
Manuscripts may be submitted no later than 29 February 2024 through the regular submission site of Plant Cell Reports. The topical collection will include review papers, including mini-reviews on timely and focused topics, original research papers, and short Focus papers on the synthetic biology of plants. Please indicate that your manuscript belongs to the Topical Collection at the “additional information” step during submission. All manuscripts will be subject to standard peer review and evaluation. Accepted papers will be published online immediately after acceptance. We look forward to receiving your contributions!