17. Tawni Bull: Developing control systems for engineering plants

Full title. Developing control systems for engineering plants
Abstract. Reengineering plants presents a promising avenue to food security, environmental remediation, and a sustainable bioeconomy. However, predictably altering developmental or metabolic traits is challenging as they tend to be multigenic, cross-regulated, and dependent on spatiotemporal coordination of gene expression. We are developing control systems to fine-tune expression across multiple genes, as well as in planta methods to rapidly prototype control system architectures and the phenotypic outcomes of expression reprogramming. We are also developing novel agrochemical responsive signaling systems to enable temporal control of expression, as well as ribozymes-based tools to target regulation to specific tissues. We hypothesize the spatiotemporal control these tools provide will enable circumventing negative side-effects typically associated with constitutively altered expression. The design rules we uncover through this work will have immediate relevance for crop engineering and create a general framework for how complex multigenic traits could be engineered in multicellular organisms.
Bio. I am a postdoctoral researcher at Arjun Khakhar’s lab at Colorado State University. I received my bachelor’s in biology from Colorado Mesa University in 2016 and my Ph.D. in Horticulture and Agronomy from UC Davis in 2022. My Ph.D work focused on identifying genes involved with regeneration and improving regeneration rates in lettuce. Since starting my postdoc, my work has focused on developing synthetic control systems to fine-tune expression across multiple genes in plant systems. In addition, I have built agrochemical responsive control systems to enable temporal control of gene expression. The goal is to implement these control systems to predictably and precisely engineer plant development.