Researchers at the Earlham Institute in Norwich have managed to turn tobacco plants into factories for moth sex pheromones using precision gene engineering techniques.
Pheromones are chemical secretions that act as hidden means of communication. These allow organisms to send signals, including when they look for partner.
Farmers hang pheromone dispersers that mime signals of female insects to distract males from finding a mate. These dispersers produce molecules by expensive chemical processes that often release toxic byproducts.
During the study, Dr. Nicola Patron, head of the Synthetic Biology Group at the Earlham Institute, used the latest techniques to turn plants into factories that produce these valuable natural products. The study was published in the journal Planet Biotechnology on Sunday.
Patron and her team used synthetic biology to engineer the essential building blocks of life, DNA with instructions that allow them to build new biological molecules, and managed to synthetically engineer plants such as tobacco into pheromone factories that only require sunlight and water.
“Synthetic biology can allow us to engineer plants to build new biological molecules, such as medicines or these pheromones,” Patron said.
“In our study, we managed to turn Nicotiana benthamiana- a species of tobacco previously used to produce Ebola antibodies and coronavirus-like particles for use in vaccines- to release moth sex pheromones,” she explained.
The team hopes their work could pave the road to using plants to produce a wide range of valuable natural products. “An advantage of using plants to build complex molecules over chemical processes is its lower cost,” she noted.
Dr. Patron envisions a future where we may see greenhouses full of plant factories- a greener, cheaper, and more sustainable way to manufacture complex molecules.
