‘Programmable plants are the future of agriculture’ says University of Cambridge expert after £7.5m grants

A University of Cambridge team aims to build the world’s first artificial plant chromosomes.

The ability to create ‘programmable plants’ would open the door to growing elite crop varieties that are resistant to disease, more nutritious or able to withstand climate change.

A team led by Prof Jake Harris, head of the chromatin and memory group in the Department of Plant Sciences, is one of two Cambridge groups to be awarded funding from the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) Synthetic Plants programme.

“We’re building the tools to make plants programmable, just like software. This isn’t science fiction – it’s the future of agriculture,” said Prof Harris, whose team has been awarded £6.5million.

Collaborating with The University of Western Australia, biotech company Phytoform Labs and the Australian Genome Foundry at Macquarie University, the team wants to build the world’s first artificial plant chromosome that can survive in a living plant – an ambitious aim that, if achieved, would be one of the most significant advances in plant synthetic biology.

Programmable plants could be given new properties like drought tolerance to reduce the amount of water they need, or the ability to withstand disease or pests.

“Our idea is that instead of modifying an existing chromosome, we design it from the ground up,” explained Prof Harris. “We’re rethinking what plants can do for us. This synthetic chromosome could one day help grow crops that are more productive, more resilient, and better for the planet.”

Synthetic chromosomes have already been achieved in simpler organisms, such as bacteria and yeast.

But this will be the first attempt to create and deploy one from scratch in a plant.

The researchers will use the moss Physcomitrium patens – a unique, highly engineerable plant – to test a bottom-up synthetic chromosome, before transferring it into potato plants.

The work would also open up the possibility of growing food and medicines in space, and advance indoor agriculture.

The second Cambridge team to be awarded funding from the programme, led by Prof Alison Smith and Dr Paweł Mordaka in the plant metabolism group, aims to use the synthetic chloroplasts to enable plants to fix nitrogen and produce vitamin B12.

The greatest cause of pollution in agriculture is the use of fertilisers to supply nitrogen and promote good crop yields. Reducing the need for fertilisers would enable more sustainable food production systems.

The team was awarded almost £1m as part of a £9m grant for the project.

Building on their previous work to design and build the entire chloroplast genome for the simple single-cell alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, they will work with an international team of researchers from the UK, USA and Germany to transfer this technology to build synthetic chloroplasts in potato plants.

Prof Smith said: “Our success would unlock powerful applications in agriculture, like plants capable of nitrogen fixation or producing essential nutrients like vitamin B12, potentially reducing fertiliser dependence and addressing malnutrition. These traits have tremendous potential should they be engineered into plants.

“It will enable scientists to surpass what can be accomplished with gene editing and equip plants with new functions, from reducing agricultural water use to protecting crop yields in uncertain conditions.”

It typically takes eight years to develop a new crop variety in the UK, but it is thought with this new technology that could reduce to one year or even less.

Such work is beyond the scope of most UK funding schemes.

Prof Harris said: “ARIA had a couple of events with synthetic biologists to look at what’s on the edge of possible, what could be useful as a moonshot approach that could really change things.

“It’s a totally different way of seeing things. We went from ‘here’s what we want to see in the world’ to ‘how are we going to get there?’ It catalysed a different team and a different way of thinking.”

“This work moves us beyond the limitations of natural genomes. It’s about designing entirely new capabilities in plants – from the molecular level up.”

Nine teams were awarded funding from ARIA’s Synthetic Plants programme in total.