Innovations in Molecular Biotechnology

ABSTRACT

Amino acids that are not de novo produced in the human body are known as essential amino acids. Among them, Lysine (Lys) is vital, which is limited to most of the cereal grains like maize. Maize has a significant contribution to global food security. Although several biotechnological approaches have shown a successful increase of maize Lys, a comprehensive strategy to increase maize Lys following synthetic genetic circuit enabled reprogramming still lacks and needs to be developed. Synthetic genetic circuit technology has been challenging to implement in plant/maize as transgenesis needs a long time, and tuning circuit activity in heterogenous cells is difficult. Quantitative transient expression assays could be done to construct synthetic maize for testing and tuning circuit designs. To construct synthetic genetic circuits in maize, synthetic transcriptional regulators need to be generated. Synthetic promoters, transcriptional activators, and repressors need to be designed and the system should be optimized. The designed synthetic parts should function independently. In synthetic maize, external control of gene expression in the Lys biosynthesis pathway or other pathways that interact with Lys biosynthesis is needed, which transmits the input for genetic circuits.

KEYWORDS

1. Lysine
2. Transcription Factors
3. Amino Acids
4. CRISPR-Cas Systems
5. Gene Expression