Publications by authors named "Agnieszka A Piatek"

Genome-editing has enabled rapid improvement for staple food crops, such as potato, a key beneficiary of the technology. In potato, starch contained within tubers represents the primary product for use in food and non-food industries. Starch granules are produced in the plastids of tubers with plastid size correlated with the size of starch grana.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The development of the 'mini-synplastome' provides a new method for introducing synthetic circuits in plant plastids without disturbing the native plastome.
  • - This innovative genome structure is based on the unique organization of dinoflagellate plastomes, featuring multiple minicircles instead of a single genome.
  • - Mini-synplastomes aim to enhance chloroplast biotechnology by allowing easy cloning and predictable transgene expression, while remaining independent from the plant's existing genetic material.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Chloroplast biotechnology is a route for novel crop metabolic engineering. The potential bio-confinement of transgenes, the high protein expression and the possibility to organize genes into operons represent considerable advantages that make chloroplasts valuable targets in agricultural biotechnology. In the last 3 decades, chloroplast genomes from a few economically important crops have been successfully transformed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Plant synthetic biology is a rapidly evolving field with new tools constantly emerging to drive innovation. Of particular interest is the application of synthetic biology to chloroplast biotechnology to generate plants capable of producing new metabolites, vaccines, biofuels, and high-value chemicals. Progress made in the assembly of large DNA molecules, composing multiple transcriptional units, has significantly aided in the ability to rapidly construct novel vectors for genetic engineering.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Owing to its small size, prokaryotic-like molecular genetics, and potential for very high transgene expression, the plastid genome (plastome) is an attractive plant synthetic biology chassis for metabolic engineering. The plastome exists as a homogenous, compact, multicopy genome within multiple-specialized differentiated plastid compartments. Because of this multiplicity, transgenes can be highly expressed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Genome editing is a powerful suite of technologies utilized in basic and applied plant research. Both nuclear and plastid genomes have been genetically engineered to alter traits in plants. While the most frequent molecular outcome of gene editing has been knockouts resulting in a simple deletion of an endogenous protein of interest from the host's proteome, new genes have been added to plant genomes and, in several instances, the sequence of endogenous genes have been targeted for a few coding changes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF