Events

Bioengineering of plants is critical to agriculture, molecular farming, and bio-commodities. However, current tools for bioengineering plants are limited in throughput, applicable to a narrow set of species, or automatic triggers for regulatory oversight. Biotechnology tools which enable direct delivery of proteins to plants could simplify the technical and regulatory process of plant bioengineering, yet proteins remain the most challenging cargoes to deliver to plants.

In this seminar, I discuss the discovery of a new class of biotechnology tools, derived from plants, capable of delivering a broad range of proteins to plants. First, I introduce fundamental challenges in developing and quantifying the efficiency of biotechnology tools in plants, describing the development of a fluorescence complementation method which addresses these challenges. Leveraging this method, I next discuss the discovery a class of plant proteins called homeoproteins which are natively cell-penetrating, capable of “self-delivery”. By computationally screening tens of thousands of plant homeoproteins, we identify a conserved domain responsible for the ability of homeoproteins to “self-deliver” and synthesize plant-based cell-penetrating peptides (pCPPs) from these domains. Finally, we demonstrate pCPPs efficiently deliver recombinant proteins to plants. This work has broad applications for agricultural biotechnology as well as implications for fundamental plant biology.

Henry Squire is a PhD candidate in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley advised by Prof. Markita Landry where he is a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow and Philomathia Environmental Sciences Fellow. He completed a BS and MS in Chemical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University where he competed on the Men’s Tennis Team and conducted research on next generation complex solvents for grid-scale electrochemical energy storage systems. Prior to starting his PhD, he worked as a materials scientist at Procter & Gamble focused on perfume delivery technologies. In the Landry Lab, his PhD work has focused broadly on developing tools for diverse plant biotechnology applications including protecting plants from pathogens and delivering biomolecules to plant cells.