The Plant Synthetic Biology (SynBio) Satellite Meeting, convened by the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), aims to raise community consciousness of what SynBio is and what it can do in key areas of economic and intellectual pursuit. These include crop productivity, specialty chemicals, biosensors, and microbe-plant interactions. The conference is structured to maximize engagement and information sharing among an estimated 185 participants at all career stages from academic, industry, and government research teams and promote public sector?industry exchanges. The impact will be especially great on early-career plant scientists, all of whom will spend their careers in the SynBio era and many of whom will pursue careers in SynBio research and development. Accordingly, up to 34 early career researchers will be supported by this award, with a special emphasis on broadening participation. The Plant SynBio Satellite Meeting will leverage its association with the annual American Society of Plant Biology 2019 meeting, which typically attracts more than 1,300 scientists from 40 countries and which will be held at the same site (San Jose, CA) just prior in August 2019. The two conferences will be integrated via a shared plenary symposium on SynBio, further extending the impact of this award to the broader plant science community that ASPB serves.
Synthetic biology (SynBio) is a transformative combination of DNA technologies, engineering principles, and computational tools that makes it possible to design new life processes and to repurpose existing, natural ones to generate new knowledge, devices, and products. SynBio is already transforming plant science in fields ranging from biosynthetic pathways to the interactions between plants and microorganisms. As both a conceptual and an operational revolution, SynBio promises to be even more creatively disruptive than the molecular biology revolution that began in the 1970s. This is because SynBio (i) opens access to the vast "design space" that plants and other organisms have that is not represented in the natural world, and (ii) industrializes biology by augmenting step-by-step work with computationally guided, automated, and standardized engineering procedures. SynBio-based companies are burgeoning, as are the career pathways that they create; however, plant scientists at all career stages are only just starting to appreciate the extent to which SynBio will impact training needs and the design and execution of experiments. The Plant SynBio Satellite Meeting, convened by the American Society of Plant Biologists, aims to raise community consciousness of what SynBio is and what it can do in key areas of economic and intellectual pursuit.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
