Engineering Organelles for Crop Improvement and Bio-Based Products

The 2025 Gordon Research Seminar on Chloroplast Biotechnology will present new research in all areas relevant to engineering chloroplasts to either improve existing functions or provide them with new ones. The seminar will discuss a range of technologies needed for applications in agriculture, industrial biotechnology or the pharmaceutical sector. Plastid transformation is becoming possible in a growing number of plant and algal species and is some model species is routine. Genetic engineering technologies are also improving and are being supported by the widespread emergence of synthetic biology approaches within the field. Strategies to reengineer the photosynthetic machinery and carbon concentrating mechanisms to improve rates of carbon fixation will be covered, as well as an exploration of how energy from photosynthesis can be channelled to new metabolic pathway designs. In parallel, the engineering of novel functions into chloroplasts to make use of their prodigious metabolic and protein synthesis capabilities is also at an exciting juncture. Ambitious projects aimed at radical redesign and synthesis of new-to-nature plastid genomes with improved traits have now been made possible and are under way in several countries. The basic science underpinning these advances (including genome structure and replication, control of gene expression, protein synthesis and import, assembly of protein complexes, protein quality control and turnover, plastid metabolism, metabolite transport) will be covered where relevant to these biotechnological applications.

The 2025 Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) on Chloroplast Biotechnology is a 2-day meeting that will take place preceding the associated Gordon Research Conference (GRC). This meeting is an opportunity for graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and other scientists with similar level of experience to present and discuss cutting-edge research in the field in a relaxed and enthusiastic atmosphere. Approximately 10 speakers will be selected from abstracts. A keynote talk by a high profile scientist in the field will conclude the meeting.