Page 42 - University of Pretoria RESEARCH REVIEW 2018

Synthetic biology for re-engineering forest biomass
Steven Hussey, Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology, and FABI
The ability to synthesise long strands of DNA, including whole genes, has fuelled the emergence of synthetic biology as a new bioengineering approach. Already widely applied in microbial systems, synthetic biology is still being adopted in plants. UP has taken a leading role in the application of this technology in plantation trees.
Aside from increasing the pro- ductivity of commercial forestry, custom-engineering woody biomass for the production of sustainable bio- materials may become an essential avenue to the rise of renewables in a circular economy. Synthetic biology approaches have the potential
to allow for the re-engineering of regulatory pathways that determine wood properties, and could also allow for the production of metabolites
and structures in wood not possible through breeding.
Dr Steven Hussey, working with Professor Zander Myburg in
the Forest Molecular Genetics Programme, leads a team investiga- ting the transcriptional regulation, epigenetics and synthetic biology of wood formation in Eucalyptus trees. They are applying the latest high- throughput techniques to map the transcriptional networks governing secondary cell wall (wood) formation in Eucalyptus and incorporating syn- thetic biology design principles into the development of a molecular ‘toolbox’ of DNA parts for woody biomass improvement.
One of the strengths of synthetic
Cross-section through a young poplar stem genetically modified to reveal
a gene's expression pattern (blue).
biology is the ability to chemically synthesise custom DNA sequences, such as genes, in a laboratory and merge them with the genomes of recipient living organisms. In 2018,
Dr Hussey in collaboration with the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute completed the design, construction and fabrication of some 286 synthetic DNA sequences for application in tree bioengineering. Published in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology, their work represents the largest open resource of its kind for forest biotechnology.
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