Detalle de: Biosolutions for feeding in a changing planet

Global population growth and environmental changes threaten future crop yields and food security, leading to malnutrition. To address this, innovative strategies are needed to adapt farming practices and ensure the four pillars of food security: availability, access, utilization, and stability. Developing climate-resilient crops and sustainable, nutritious food involves understanding survival in extreme environments, rewiring plant genomes for resilience without synthetic chemicals, and engineering alternative food production systems using plant cells and microorganisms. Synthetic biology can create beneficial microbial consortia and bioproduction systems for valuable food ingredients. This research, involving multidisciplinary teams, also contributes to knowledge on adapting to climate change and life in space.

Describe. We investigate the transcriptional and epigenetic responses to adverse environmental conditions, focusing on gene expression, non-coding RNA, DNA/histone methylation, and alternative splicing to induce specialized metabolism in microalgae and plant cells for novel pharmacological or nutritional compounds. Additionally, we screen microorganisms for beneficial symbiotic activity, study host-symbiont interaction signals, measure their effects on host physiology, and identify the responsible genes.

Predict. We use multiomics data to identify key factors in environmental stress tolerance and metabolic pathways for pharmacological and nutraceutical compounds, predicting crucial transcription factors, miRNAs, lncRNAs, and circRNAs through gene regulatory network inference. By integrating omics and climate data, we forecast crop behavior under environmental changes and develop predictive models to estimate the fitness of metabolically engineered microorganisms in bioreactors, as well as plant cell and microbial responses to low background radiation.

Apply. Our goal is to develop a genome editing and cisgenics platform to enhance plant stress tolerance and cultivate plants with pharmacological and nutritional value. We aim to rewire metabolic pathways in microorganisms and plant cell suspensions, and create and test beneficial microbial consortia for food applications.