UC Berkeley

Plants have been the highest volume source of biomass and biomaterials for human use since the agricultural revolution, and even before that in most societies. Despite incredible advances in synthetic chemistry and microbial synthetic biology, plants remain the key source for calories and nutrients, and critical feedstocks for materials, fuel, and drugs. This thesis consists of four body chapters. The first outlines the background of plant biotechnology and highlights a useful principle used in plant breeding but not well-known among plant biotechnologists. The second outlines how natural plant engineers outperform and might inspire the plant synthetic biologists of the future. The third chapter reports the first independent replication of an extremely exciting and surprising finding first reported halfway through my PhD. The fourth presents a large suite of genetic parts, specifically transcriptional repressors. Each chapter is intended to stand largely on its own, but I nonetheless believe the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, combining a conceptual advance, a look at nature’s plant synthetic biologists, a replication project which lies at the heart of the scientific method, and the development of a novel suite of tools which lies at the heart of synthetic biology.