Welcome to our Bioengineering page, where we delve into pioneering technologies that are shaping the future of agriculture. Discover how our research with Professor Borneman's advanced Metabolic Models for Citrus, an innovative approach to enhancing traits in citrus plants for drought tolerance and HLB resistance bridges the gap between laboratory innovations and real-world agricultural applications. Explore our projects aimed at enhancing drought tolerance, disease resistance, and overall sustainability in agriculture. Join us in our journey to revolutionize the citrus industry and beyond.
Our research project is deeply rooted in the ambition to enhance the economics, productivity, and sustainability of California's specialty crops, with citrus taking center stage. By leveraging computation-based metabolic models, we aim to expedite the citrus engineering process, paving the way for faster innovations not just in citrus but in all of California's specialty crops.
Our long-term vision revolves around the development of crops that are not only resistant to plant and pest diseases and drought but also have superior taste and nutritional profiles. To showcase the potential of our approach, our immediate objective centers on utilizing metabolic models to hasten two distinct stages of the citrus engineering process.
Metabolic models, derived from genome-scale reconstructed networks, are powerful tools that serve dual roles. They help interpret current phenotypic states and predict future ones. When integrated with high-throughput engineering methodologies, these models present a unique opportunity to optimize growth rates, enhance drought resistance, and combat diseases.
Agricultural ecosystems are under continuous threat from both environmental stresses and emerging diseases, leading to devastating crop losses. By bolstering crop improvement methodologies, like our advanced genetic engineering techniques, this project serves a broad spectrum of stakeholders—from academic researchers and breeders to agricultural biotech firms and growers. Notably, the success of this endeavor will fortify the U.S.'s stance in global agriculture, ensuring the delivery of safe, nutritious, and resilient food crops to consumers.
Moreover, the reduced resource inputs for these enhanced crops signify a positive environmental impact. The methodologies and insights derived from this project will act as a template for engineering other crops, thereby amplifying its benefits manifold.
Improving the Economics, Productivity, and Sustainability of the California Citrus Industry by Accelerating the Citrus Engineering Process.
The long-term goal of this project is to improve the economics, productivity, and sustainability of California’s specialty crops by accelerating the plant-engineering process. Although plant transformation and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-based editing has and will continue to revolutionize agriculture by creating crops with beneficial properties, there are still well-recognized bottlenecks in these processes. The expected outcome of this project is to overcome some of these bottlenecks by using metabolic models to increase the growth rate of citrus in two important steps of the engineering process. We also expect that this project will have broader impacts by providing a blueprint to accelerate the plant engineering process for other California specialty crop industries. Finally, since metabolic models have been shown to enhance breeding programs by improving the prediction accuracy of molecular markers, the models constructed by this project could have considerable value beyond the specific goals of this project.
Watch the YouTube video to learn more about this project
Designing Drought Tolerant Specialty Crops Using Metabolic Modeling
The long-term goal of this project is to improve the productivity and sustainability of California’s specialty crops by using metabolic models to create solutions that enable growers to more effectively respond to droughts. Climate change has and will continue to cause a variety of problems for California agriculture, including those caused by droughts. Water shortages caused by climate change are predicted to cause considerable agricultural losses in California, including yield reductions of 20% to 40% in avocados, oranges, walnuts, almonds, and table grapes. This project is addressing the predicted climate- and drought-associated yield losses by endeavoring to use metabolic models to create drought-tolerant varieties and other near term solutions.
Watch the YouTube video to learn more about this project
Managing Citrus Huanglongbing Disease Using a Model-Driven Approach.
The long-term goal of this project is to develop strategies to manage citrus Huanglongbing (HLB). This disease has recently caused annual losses of over 1 billion dollars and 7,900 jobs in Florida. Production volumes in FL have also decreased by approximately 74% over the last two decades, which has been primarily attributed to HLB. Roughly two-thirds of the FL juicing plants have been closed and the industry is getting close to a complete collapse. Since similar effects happen in California, new and more effective management strategies are urgently needed. This project is to use a model-driven approach to understand a process that is causing natural HLB control, and then use that knowledge to create new, effective, and sustainable HLB control strategies. This natural process occurs in Survivor Trees in Florida – where diseased trees have becoming healthy over a several year period. Because these management strategies will based on a natural phenomenon, we expect the management strategies that are derived from this work will creation of more environmentally friendly management strategies more environmentally friendly and move through the regulation process in an expeditious manner.
Systems Biology to Elucidate the CLas-Citrus-Psyllid Interactions needed to Culture, Inhibit, and Detect CLas for Successful HLB Management
This project is to create effective prophylactic and curative Huanglongbing (HLB) treatments (Objective 1). Our approach will use the citrus tristeza virus (CTV) to deliver antimicrobial peptides to the habitat (phloem) of the putative HLB pathogen (CLas). To substantially increase the efficacy of this approach, we are borrowing an approach used in human infectious disease, which engineers antimicrobial peptides to specifically target the designated microbes. This approach can increase the efficacies of antimicrobial peptides by orders of magnitude, with some being able to kill greater than 500 times more bacteria, which we expect will transform an HLB treatment that is minimally to moderately effective into one that is highly effective. This project will also create an in silico metabolic model of the HLB pathosystem, which will enable a systems-biology-based understanding of CLas, citrus and the Asian citrus psyllid, along with their interactions (Objective 2). This model will provide researchers, engineers and agribusinesses with a powerful suite of tools and an unprecedented base of knowledge – which we expect will enable them to create (i) anti-CLas molecules, (ii) HLB-tolerant/resistant citrus (iii) early detection methods as well as (iv) media and conditions to cultivate CLas in vitro. Our project will also perform analyses to determine if our HLB management solutions will be economically feasible (Objective 3), and it will implement an extension and outreach program (Objective 4) for scientists and citrus stakeholders.
LabtoFarm's commitment to sustainable and innovative agriculture extends beyond the laboratory. We actively engage with the citrus industry, growers, nursery personnel, and the general public, sharing our groundbreaking research on metabolic modeling and its real-world implications. Our outreach endeavors are designed to foster understanding, addressing key areas such as the safety and benefits of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and non-GMO plant engineering.
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In our digital age, we recognize the significance of online platforms. Lab to farm members, Dr. Pagliaccia and Dr. Michalis Faloutsos, a professor from the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Riverside, are steering our digital outreach. Dr. Faloutsos and his graduate student, Arman Irani, actively monitor agricultural forums, collecting and analyzing vast amounts of user-generated content. Through iterations of their proprietary data analysis tool, they capture trending topics, user sentiments, and emergent themes. These insights guide our outreach strategy, ensuring we address prevalent concerns and curiosities. These efforts culminate in our dedicated project website, providing accessible knowledge, fostering dialogue, and championing a more informed and engaged agricultural community. See our first publication below.
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We will also conduct interactive presentations and demonstrations with the California Department of Food and Agriculture's Citrus Pest and Disease Prevention Division and their Outreach Contractor. These outreach activities will elucidate our research methods and findings and highlight how these discoveries are translated into tangible solutions benefiting the citrus industry and beyond.
