A bioengineering platform for creating agriculturally-applicable sentinel plants

Feeding the world will depend on bioengineering solutions that improve existing agricultural practices and are simple to implement at the farm. A promising emerging technology to improve agricultural practices is the use of crops that use light to report their needs in real time. Our network of leading researchers from Japan and the UK aims to produce such luminescent plants for use in the laboratory and at the farm. We will bioengineer a new bioluminescence platform that can turn plants into tools that report the release of jasmonic and salicylic acids – the most common plant hormones activated by pest or pathogen attacks. The team will use this platform to create several such plants: tobacco and Arabidopsis, for the scientific community, and rice and soybean, which for farmers to measure in real time the extent of pest damage to their crop. These plants will emit green light when healthy and will turn red when they detect a pest or herbivore attack. Our reporter soybean or rice plants can be planted together with the crops in the field and allow the farmer to detect pest damage by looking for red light emitted by the reporter plants from a cheap aerial drone. This work will be made possible by an interdisciplinary network of scientists from Japan and the UK, combining complementary expertise in machine learning, molecular engineering and plant science, made possible by a series of exchange visits between the two countries.