Academic management

Plant Biotechnology is one of the compulsory subjects in the Fundamental module, which is taught in the first semester of the Master in Biotechnology of Environment and Health. The main purpose of this subject is provide the students a solid introduction to Plant Biotechnology, a group of different technologies focused in improving crops or obtaining industry-demanding products such as secondary metabolites, vaccines, or biofuels. These techniques comprises: in vitro culture of cells, tissues and organs; procedures to inducer cell totipotency for the regeneration of shoots or somatic embryos from callus, protoplasts or other explants; molecular markers to assess genetic and epigenetic changes in the regenerated in vitro plants; procedures for the long-term conservation of plant germplasm or biotechnological plant materials; and techniques aimed to obtain new genetic combinations as protoplast fusion, and gen transfer techniques. New alternatives based on metabolic engineering, or looking for desired phenotypes through exploring natural variation have recently open a new and wide set of approaches for improving plant productivity and generating new sources of bioactive compounds and medicines.

Plant biotechnology can be considered the basis for the sustainable growth of mankind. On one side crop improvement is required reducing the number of people living in poverty through the development of high-yielding genetically engineered varieties that are resistant to weeds, insect pests, diseases, or harsh environmental constraints such as drought. On the other side, the employ of key species, and the establishment of the new concept of Biorefinery, opened the possibility of establishing more efficient cultures dedicated to produce energy (biofuels or biomass) with reduced CO2 balance and impact over environment while also producing industry-demanding molecules as subproducts or focusing entirely in the production of high value added compounds that can be used as medicines, vaccines or at synthesis processes.

To adequately take advantage of the subject it is desirable to have knowledge of the following: Biology, cell biology, basic recombinant DNA technology, and plant physiology. 

COMPETENCES

• CE1. To acquire the grounds of modern plant biotechnology in an autonomous way, as a basis to have a deeper plant biotechnology knowledge.

• CE4. To gain an integrated vision of the research, development and innovation (I+D+i) processes, from the discovery of new knowledge to de development of new applications based on them, and the marketing of such new biotechnology products.

• CE5. To have advanced knowledge about programmed selective manipulation of plant molecular and cellular processes in order to obtain new products or services.  

LEARNING RESULTS

To be able to design strategies to obtain new plant genetic combinations aimed to crop improvement and the production of molecules of industrial interest in food, medicine, pharmacology or other plant biotechnological applications.

To present, elaborate, and discuss adequate approaches of plant biotechnology to solve specific problems in a clear and concise way, addressed to specialized or general publics. 

This subject is organized in eight independent blocks covering the most important aspects of plant biotechnology.

0. Brief introduction to Plant Biotechnology.          

1. Improving plant productivity to sustain and satisfy human demand. From Hunter Gatherer to Green Revolution (and Beyond).

2. Manipulation of plant development. Plant tissue culture. Micropropagation. Haploid Culture. Somaclonal variation.  Cell culture.

3. Plant Genetic engineering: How do you make transgenic plants? Differences between genetically engineered crops and non-genetically engineered crops.

4. Transgenic plants. The future of GM crops remains a vital debate: advantages and disadvantages.

Plants as new sources of bioactive compounds and medicines.

5. The Green gold and the Third Green Revoluton: Fibering and Fueling mankind in XXIth century.

6. Systems Biology and Synthetic Biology. Translational applications of high-throughput phenotyping at molecular level related to the manipulation of plant metabolism.

7. Natural variation. Using natural variation to identify novel genes related to plant production and its biotechnological considerations.

The course is organized in eight independent blocks. Each block will be organized as follows:

• 1 h of Lecture. During this period the main objectives of the block will be shown, providing adequate and accurate tools and guidance for student’s personal work.

• 2 h of classroom practices. All the blocks have assigned two sessions separated in time that will follow problem-based learning methodology. During this period the teacher will suggest practical real-life-inspired problems to be solved by the students (1h). At the end of the session, the teacher will propose challenging activities for applying and deepening into the different topics introduced within each block. The proposed case-studies will be presented by students and discussed under the supervision of the teacher (1h).

• 8-9 h of personal/group work. This time will be used to master the required lecture topics that will be used for solving the different case studies.

• An average of 30 min of group-tutoring per block, usually during the implementation practices between the first and second classroom practice sessions.

• If necessary, the theoretical and practical classroom sessions can be developed telematically using the tools available on the intranet of the University of Oviedo.

• Continuous assessment of students’ attendance to lectures, practices, and tutoring sessions (10%).

• Continuous assessment of the participation of students in seminars, their capacity of analysis and discussion of articles or other sources of information, and how they write, organize and orally present their work (40%).

• Written exam (50%). The exam will cover theoretical and practical concepts, similar to those proposed in the seminars, i.e. reasoned resolution of case-studies or analysis of scientific publications. The test will be based on multiple answers [Correct (+1), incorrect (-0.3)] and a number of short questions. A minimum of 50% of the marks both in practices and exam is required to pass. Exams shall be answered in English.

• Although this is a face-to-face subject for both teaching and assessment, if the situation so requires, both the practical work sessions (presentations) and the exams could be developed online using the tools available at the University of Oviedo

• In cases with the right to a duly accredited "differentiated evaluation" that entail the impossibility of participating in face-to-face activities, the continuous evaluation may be partially or totally replaced by the performance of non-face-to-face tasks, or by an additional specific test.

Textbooks:

• Acquaah G. (2012). Principles of Plant Genetics and Breeding. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN: 978-0470664759

• Slater A., Scott N.W., Fowler M.R. (2008). Plant Biotechnology: The Genetic Manipulation of Plants. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0199282616

• Taiz, L., & Zeiger, E. (2010). Plant physiology 5th Ed. Sunderland: Sinauer Assoc. ISBN: 978-0878938667

Specific readings:

• Abelson, Philip H. and Pamela J. Hines The Plant Revolution. (1999) Science 285: 367-368

• Atwell S. et al. (2010). Genome-wide association study of 107 phenotypes in Arabidopsis thaliana inbred lines; Nature 465 (7298): 627-31.

• Gasser CS and Fraley RT. (1992) Transgenic Crops. Scientific American 266: 62-69.

• Georgianna, D. R., & Mayfield, S. P. (2012). Exploiting diversity and synthetic biology for the production of algal biofuels. Nature, 488(7411), 329-335.

• Liu, W., & Stewart, C. N. (2015). Plant synthetic biology. Trends in plant science, 20(5), 309-317.

• Lucht JM. (2015). Public Acceptance of Plant Biotechnology and GM Crops. Viruses, 7(8), 4254-4281.

• Meijón M., Satbhai S.B., Tsuchimatsu T. & Busch W. (2014) Genome-wide association study using cellular traits identifies a new regulator of root development in Arabidopsis; Nature Genetics 46 (1): 77-83.

• Seren Ü. et al. (2012) GWAPP: a web application for genome-wide association mapping in Arabidopsis; Plant Cell 24: 4793–4805.

• Shindo C., Bernasconi G. & Hardtke C.S. (2007). Natural Genetic Variation in Arabidopsis: Tools, Traits and Prospects for Evolutionary Ecology; Annals of Botany 99: 1043–1054.

• Valledor, L., Furuhashi, T., Recuenco-Muñoz, L., Wienkoop, S., & Weckwerth, W. (2014). System-level network analysis of nitrogen starvation and recovery in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii reveals potential new targets for increased lipid accumulation. Biotechnology for biofuels, 7(1), 171.

• Weckwerth, W. (2011). Green systems biology—from single genomes, proteomes and metabolomes to ecosystems research and biotechnology. Journal of Proteomics, 75(1), 284-305.

Additional support and references will be provided during the course.