Work in progress

Portal to Marchantia plant-related resources - arising from work at Jim Haseloff's lab at the University of Cambridge

Marchantia: a simple platform for plant bioengineering

Plant systems are characterised by complex genetic and cellular networks that are locked together by dynamic, parallel and non-linear feedback interactions that give rise to self-organised growth, repair and propagation. These evolved systems pose formidable barriers to traditional engineering approaches. Yet, the challenge is compelling. Plants are self-assembling bioreactors fed off sun and solutes. Plant reprogramming offers new prospects for low-cost and large-scale production of engineered molecules.

The non-vascular plant Marchantia polymorpha has morphological simplicity, simple underlying genome structure and ease of culture, transformation and analysis. These properties make it an ideal system for experiments in plant development and synthetic biology.

In our lab at the University of Cambridge, we have been developing tools and resources that make advanced work with Marchantia ever more accessible. With my retirement, and closing down of our well-resourced laboratory, I am tackling the challenge of developing small-scale and cheap techniques for bioengineering - exploiting the experimental simplicity of the Marchantia system and development of table-top devices and instrumentation using easily available commodity components. The aim is to produce open, shared designs that could be used in education, community labs and research. Jim Haseloff.