Team:UZurich/Plant
Best Plant Synthetic Biology
Novel Plant Protection Strategy
We are confident that our project is eligible for the best plant project as we have explored a truly novel and important approach to help plants protect themselves: Outer Membrane Vesicles (OMVs) as means to deliver elicitors. We have laid the groundwork for future projects by showing that OMVs can induce the immune reaction in plants both with and without our constructs, which primes them to protect themselves against a wide array of pathogens.
Our OMVs were constructed to express elicitors flg22 and elf18. We showed that our constructs (ClyA-flg22 (BBa_K3989010), ClyA-elf18 (BBa_K3989011)) activate PRRs and thus induce an immune response. On our Results page and our proof of concept page you can see in more detail that our constructs are compatible with the model organism A. thaliana as well as plants of the same genus Brassicacea. In theory, by exchanging the epitope/elicitors fused to our ClyA construct, one could target specific PRRs of other plants which may induce a higher immune response within the genus like elf18 does in A. thaliana.
During our project we came up with a new idea: could vesicles be used as transporters to deliver cargo such as DNA, RNA or proteins into plants? To test this, we conducted a fusion experiment where we infilarated N. benthamiana with Cytoplasmic Membrane Vesicles (CMVs).
In effect, we have made the first steps to establish membrane vesicles as a new human-plant interface. So far, there has been little research on the interaction between OMVs and plants, even though they are being investigated extensively as a drug delivery system in humans. Since we saw great potential in OMVs to act as a display system for plants as well, we decided to take the plunge. We have shown that we can harvest OMVs, engineer them in a way that they carry elicitors on their membrane and induce an immune response in the plant when it comes in contact with OMVs. This shows that OMVs can be used to interact with plants in certain ways. We hope that future iGEM teams will not be discouraged by the lack of knowledge but rather will be excited to take up the challenge to use this novel platform in creative ways. Certainly, there are more applications for OMVs in plant biology than the one we focused on.