United Kingdom
June 2, 2025
Delivered by a collaboration from the Earlham Institute, Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, at the University of Manchester, and the John Innes Centre, the project will first focus on potatoes, a staple crop for millions of people.
Researchers will leverage advances in engineering biology to establish synthetic plant chromosome (synPAC) technologies. These technologies promise to provide powerful new ways of introducing novel traits to plants —such as producing essential nutrients or increased pest resistance—while maintaining the plant’s existing characteristics.
Modern agriculture faces significant challenges, from climate change to soil degradation and food security concerns. However, traditional plant breeding and selection can take decades to introduce beneficial traits, relying on random genetic mixing over multiple generations.
Professor Anthony Hall, Project Co-Lead and Head of Plant Genomics at the Earlham Institute, said: “Climate instability, changes in land use, and global conflicts are creating increasing demands on our farmland. This requires us to rethink how we develop new crops to feed our growing populations, replace fossil fuels, and provide new platforms for biomanufacturing.
“These technologies have the power to remove breeding bottlenecks that have stymied development of new and improved crops. We want to establish a robust, flexible, and reproducible engineering ecosystem to allow the targeted programming of plants at a scale that can transform food security and open up new areas of biomanufacturing.”
This project will develop synPACs, a novel system for rapidly designing and delivering beneficial traits to plants. Building on natural processes, synPACs enable researchers to rapidly introduce multi-gene traits in a far more precise, controllable, and predictable fashion — offering an innovative alternative to conventional breeding methods.
To achieve this, scientists at the University of Manchester will develop unique new technologies that will allow crop scientists to design and build chromosomes carrying desired traits. synPACs will use Saccharomyces cerevisiae (common baker’s yeast) as a DNA assembly line to efficiently assemble large segments of plant DNA into synthetic chromosomes. These will be directly transferred to crop plants using highly efficient methods developed at the John Innes Centre and characterised at the Earlham Institute.
Dr Joshua James, Research Fellow at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology said: "This project will address these challenges by increasing plant resilience to climate change and pests, therefore reducing the need for harmful agrochemicals such as pesticides, and supporting more sustainable farming which is better for the health of both people and the planet.
"We hope that our work will support global ambitions of finding a sustainable way to secure our food supply chains.”
The Earlham Institute will lead on three key areas of the project. Professor Anthony Hall will oversee the development of a potato tissue atlas and regulatory element discovery. The assembly and testing of a potato regulatory element library will be led by Dr Carolina Grandellis through the Earlham Biofoundry. While Dr Conrad Nieduszynski’s team leads on engineering and maintenance of synPAC components.
The first phase of the project will focus on potatoes, a globally important crop, with the goal of developing technology pipelines to fast-track plant engineering. Initial target traits will include enhanced nutritional content and resilience against environmental stressors, as well as improving agricultural sustainability by reducing reliance on chemical inputs while improving crop yields. By enabling plants to efficiently produce valuable compounds, synPACs could also support the development of new, plant-based sources of essential nutrients and bioactive compounds, benefiting both human health and the environment.
Professor Anne Osbourn FRS, Group Leader and Deputy Director of the John Innes Centre said: "This vital funding means we can begin to programme and engineer plants at scale, creating and testing custom-built plant chromosomes to help crop resilience against disease and climate change, and to make crops more nutritious.
"At the John Innes Centre we will be testing bespoke techniques and refining each stage of the synthetic chromosome creation process in potatoes, ensuring safety and effectiveness, with a view to trialling different plants too.
"This innovation has the potential to transform plant science, breeding and agriculture, allowing fast and large-scale improvements at a genetic level, to support farmers and food security in the UK and worldwide."
The synPAC initiative is committed to working transparently with industry partners, regulators, and the public to ensure responsible development and application of this technology. The research team is focused on delivering benefits for both farmers and consumers, ensuring that crops developed through this platform align with the highest standards of safety, sustainability, and societal acceptance. The synPAC team will work closely with social science teams also funded by ARIA to explore these critical issues.
Professor Patrick Cai, Chair in Synthetic Genomics at the University of Manchester, said: “We are proud to be directly addressing a huge planetary challenge through our research. Feeding our growing population is becoming increasingly difficult as land is taken away from agriculture, soil quality is degrading, and climate change is affecting crop growth and yield.”
With a clear roadmap for Phase Two, the synPAC team aims to expand this technology to other staple crops, ultimately ushering in a new age of crops optimised for climate resilience, nutrition, and sustainability.
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