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How to engineer the unknown: Advancing a quantitative and predictive understanding of plant and soil biology to address climate change
Our basic understanding of carbon cycling in the biosphere remains qualitative and incomplete, precluding our ability to effectively engineer novel solutions to climate change. How can we attempt to engineer the unknown? This challenge has been faced before in plant biology, providing a roadmap to g...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10351729/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37459291 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002190 |
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author | Alamos, Simon Shih, Patrick M. |
author_facet | Alamos, Simon Shih, Patrick M. |
author_sort | Alamos, Simon |
collection | PubMed |
description | Our basic understanding of carbon cycling in the biosphere remains qualitative and incomplete, precluding our ability to effectively engineer novel solutions to climate change. How can we attempt to engineer the unknown? This challenge has been faced before in plant biology, providing a roadmap to guide future efforts. We use examples from over a century of photosynthesis research to illustrate the key principles that will set future plant engineering on a solid footing, namely, an effort to identify the key control variables, quantify the effects of systematically tuning these variables, and use theory to account for these observations. The main contributions of plant synthetic biology will stem not from delivering desired genotypes but from enabling the kind of predictive understanding necessary to rationally design these genotypes in the first place. Only then will synthetic plant biology be able to live up to its promise. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10351729 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-103517292023-07-18 How to engineer the unknown: Advancing a quantitative and predictive understanding of plant and soil biology to address climate change Alamos, Simon Shih, Patrick M. PLoS Biol Essay Our basic understanding of carbon cycling in the biosphere remains qualitative and incomplete, precluding our ability to effectively engineer novel solutions to climate change. How can we attempt to engineer the unknown? This challenge has been faced before in plant biology, providing a roadmap to guide future efforts. We use examples from over a century of photosynthesis research to illustrate the key principles that will set future plant engineering on a solid footing, namely, an effort to identify the key control variables, quantify the effects of systematically tuning these variables, and use theory to account for these observations. The main contributions of plant synthetic biology will stem not from delivering desired genotypes but from enabling the kind of predictive understanding necessary to rationally design these genotypes in the first place. Only then will synthetic plant biology be able to live up to its promise. Public Library of Science 2023-07-17 /pmc/articles/PMC10351729/ /pubmed/37459291 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002190 Text en © 2023 Alamos, Shih https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Essay Alamos, Simon Shih, Patrick M. How to engineer the unknown: Advancing a quantitative and predictive understanding of plant and soil biology to address climate change |
title | How to engineer the unknown: Advancing a quantitative and predictive understanding of plant and soil biology to address climate change |
title_full | How to engineer the unknown: Advancing a quantitative and predictive understanding of plant and soil biology to address climate change |
title_fullStr | How to engineer the unknown: Advancing a quantitative and predictive understanding of plant and soil biology to address climate change |
title_full_unstemmed | How to engineer the unknown: Advancing a quantitative and predictive understanding of plant and soil biology to address climate change |
title_short | How to engineer the unknown: Advancing a quantitative and predictive understanding of plant and soil biology to address climate change |
title_sort | how to engineer the unknown: advancing a quantitative and predictive understanding of plant and soil biology to address climate change |
topic | Essay |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10351729/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37459291 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002190 |
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