Team:Marburg/Human Practices/Integrated/Corteva
Corteva agriscience
William Gordon-Kamm (Corteva)
William Gordon-Kamm is a research fellow in one of the biggest american biotechnology companies: Corteva agriscience. His work in the Bbm/Wus2 system has significantly decreased the amount of time needed for recovering somatic embryos from maize plants after transformation (Hoerster et al., 2020). He was very open to our questions and eager to provide us with helpful context from the point of view of someone working for almost 30 years in the industry.
From our conversation, we gathered important information about the industry workflow when creating new crop varieties, as well as what characteristics they consider valuable when talking about a prototyping platform.
For Corteva, the biggest bottleneck is the transformation process: it involves about 10 to 12 weeks of growth and selection of tissue cultures, depending on the plant. This seems to be same issue holding back research into transplastomic plants:
“The industry tends to be pretty short sighted in terms of their objectives: we’ve got a commercial goal, what's the fastest way we can get there? You are always balancing the possibilities. So far chloroplast just haven’t become feasible enough in our major crops and in commercially relevant germplasm, because if we do this in a model genotype then you gotta clean up all the genetics of that model genotype by intergressing back into commercially relevant germplasm and that takes years. It’s a complex decision making process, so far [nuclear transformation] has just been much more rapid, and hasn't had the specific need [for transplastomic plants]. That Could change, every time you can shift the metabolism of the cell , you can provide an advantage to the cell but you can also create unintended problems. One of those, if you have to express a gene in a high level for it to be effective, that puts a metabolic load in the cell, and one of the potential advantages that's been touted in chloroplasts is that you can produce such large levels of proteins”
This made it clear to us that the industry is aware of the benefits of engineering the chloroplast, but the lengthy transformation and selection process still holds the technology back. For our system to be attractive for researchers, he believes it would need to be able to deliver answers faster than the current methods of transforming whole organisms:
“I think the requirement is going to be a system that is simply going to allow us to produce answers more rapidly than we could produce by having to make whole transgenic plants”
Moreover, delivering results comparable to in vivo experiments would be an important condition to the use of Cell-Free systems for more complex prototyping tasks.
“Certainly, in terms of trying to understand very complicated pathway engineering. If you could do that in vitro I think just, you know, from a knowledge perspective in terms of understanding the complexity of the system understanding what the final product is gonna look like, if you could really, If your assays were sensitive enough, that you could understand how you are changing the balance of all the components, of all the metabolic components that you are potentially impacting when alter that pathway, of you could use in vitro system to understand that complexity before you had to try to reproduce in a plant you could save a tremendous amount of time.”
Our Insights
The use of cell free systems can provide the edge needed for the industry to consider a transplastomic approach to crop improvement, given that it cuts the months needed for transformation down to hours of in vitro testing. This would be especially useful when testing complex metabolic pathways, or even new selection markers to facilitate the selection of homoplastomic plants during the transformation process. With that in mind, we decided to evaluate the effect of different antibiotics in our prototyping system to determine the feasibility of screening for selection markers .
This Interview also gave us further motivation to do in vivo experiments despite the limited time-frame of an iGEM Project, as high comparability seemed to be a key factor in the industry.