Viktoriya Georgieva L&S Biological Sciences
Promoter Engineering for Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency
With the current state of escalating climate emergency, generation of plants with improved ability to sequester carbon is of high priority. The Rieske subunit of the cytochrome b6f complex is a known rate-limiting step in photosynthesis. This protein, encoded for by the PetC gene, is found to increase photosynthetic efficiency upon overexpression in plants, demonstrating potential for increased carbon sequestration.
However, due to current restrictions on GMOs, overexpression needs to be achieved nontransgenically to create a practical impact. Given that this has yet to be attempted, this project aims to overexpress PetC in rice, one of the most widely-grown crops. This will be achieved via insertion of cis-regulatory elements (CREs)—short sequences that bind transcription factors to regulate gene expression— into the native promoter, with the overarching goals to further climate change mitigation and inform future promoter CRE engineering efforts in crops.
Message To Sponsor
Thank you CACSSF for sponsoring my reaserch this summer! What I enjoyed most about SURF was being exposed to a preview of the full pipeline of completing a project, from the proposal to the final presentation, which I think was incredibly valuable to go through. I learned a lot from the workshops that I attended, and I feel a lot more prepared and informed about taking my next steps to ultimately go to grad school, which is more exciting than daunting now that I have this experience and advice from my mentors! Thank you for providing me with this amazing opportunity!