Coordinator: Università degli Studi di Torino
Scientific Officer: Luca Dondini
Duration: 12/10/2023 - 12/10/2025
Research group: Luca Dondini, Cecilia Domenichini.
Genetic engineering of plants is at the core of environmental sustainability efforts, natural product synthe-sis of pharmaceuticals, and agricultural crop engineering to meet the needs of a growing population in a changing global climate. Recent progress in genome-editing tool development has revolutionized re-searcher abilities to genetically probe and modify living systems. However, genetic engineering of mature plants and their plastids has remained a challenge owing to the numerous physical barriers that need to be crossed for mature plant genome editing. Nanomaterials and nanobubbles hold great promise to advance our knowledge of –and toolsets for– genome editing, particularly for plant science. The physical barrier presented by the cell wall has limited the ease and throughput with which exogenous biomolecules can be delivered to plants. Current techniques suffer from host range limitations, low trans-formation efficiencies, toxicity, and unavoidable DNA integration into the host genome. The TARGET pro-ject will use and develop nanoparticle and nanobubbles platforms (used in the human pharmacology field to deliver drugs) to enable electrostatic grafting of genome engineering biomolecules, which will be lever-aged to genetically transform mature plants. We would like in this project (i) use and develop nanoparticles which transport across the plant cell mem-branes protein and DNA. (ii) Identify nanoparticles or nanobubbles that are highly efficient for plant cell in-ternalization, and utilize such nanoparticles to deliver DNA, RNA, and Cas9-gRNA RNP to different plant ma-trices, such as calli, somatic embryos, meristem or protoplasts in a fruit tree species-independent manner.