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SUMMARY:Plant Metabolic Clusters – From Genetics to Genomics - Anne Osbo
 urne\, John Innes Centre
DTSTART:20180524T120000Z
DTEND:20180524T130000Z
UID:TALK82591@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:david baulcombe
DESCRIPTION:Plants produce a wealth of natural products that are valuable 
 as industrial or pharmaceutical products. The growing reliance on chemical
 s from plants is driving demand for green\, environmentally friendly and s
 ustainable feedstocks across industrial sectors in order to enable us to r
 educe our dependence on products derived from chemical refineries.  Import
 antly\, many of the natural products that are produced by plants are struc
 turally complex and beyond the reach of chemical synthesis. These compound
 s are commonly extracted from plant material either growing in the wild or
  in cultivation. Availability is limited by difficulties in accessing and 
 cultivating source species\, low yield and problems of purification. The s
 cale of the economic opportunity for improving the supply of high value pr
 oducts from plants is therefore enormous.\n \nThe vast majority of the nat
 ural product diversity encoded by plant genomes remains as yet untapped. T
 he explosion in plant genome sequence data\, coupled with affordable DNA s
 ynthesis and new DNA assembly technologies\, now offer unprecedented oppor
 tunities to harness the full breadth of plant natural product diversity an
 d generate novel molecules in foreign hosts using synthetic biology approa
 ches. The recent discovery that genes for the synthesis of different kinds
  of natural products are organised in biosynthetic gene clusters in plant 
 genomes opens up opportunities for mining for new pathways and chemistries
 . This advance\, in combination with powerful new transient plant expressi
 on technology\, is enabling the development of rational strategies to prod
 uce known and new-to-nature chemicals tailored for particular applications
 . This presentation will focus on our work on developing a translational s
 ynthetic biology pipeline for rapid preparative access to plant natural pr
 oducts and novel analogs using synthetic biology approaches.  It will also
  highlight recent advances in our understanding of the genomic rearrangeme
 nts underpinning the formation of new plant biosynthetic gene clusters. \n
 \n*Enid MacRobbie (FRS) is a pioneer of plant biophysics\, the first woman
  to be awarded a personal Chair in science at Cambridge and our first fema
 le Head of Department. She continues to inspire.*
LOCATION:Department of Plant Sciences\, Large Lecture Theatre
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