PROMOTEROME: isolation and characterization of plant promoters for biotechnological purposes

• Grant number: 19/12424-6
• Support Opportunities: Program for Research on Bioenergy (BIOEN) - Regular Program Grants
• Duration: May 01, 2020 - April 30, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Agronomical Sciences - Agronomy - Crop Science
• Principal Investigator: Michael dos Santos Brito
• Grantee: Michael dos Santos Brito
• Host Institution: Instituto de Ciência e Tecnologia (ICT). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus São José dos Campos. São José dos Campos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

There is is a growing need for renewable energy sources with low environmental impact. A viable alternative is to use genetically modified plants to increase biomass for lignocellulosic biofuel production. In this scenario, one of the main bottlenecks for obtaining genetically modified plants is the lack of promoters well characterized as a tool to direct the expression of previously selected genes. In sugar cane, a plant with great potential to accumulate biomass, the bottleneck is even bigger, once until now there still no well characterized sugar cane genome data. Based on this, this project aims to identify and characterize new sugarcane as well as other close related plant promoters for the production of new engineered plants for biotechnological purposes. To reach this goal, we are going to start to analyze transcriptomic and genomic data of plants such as: sugarcane, sorghum and corn. Based on this expression data such as organ-specific (stem or leaf - both with high biomass accumulation) and constitutive (expression distributed throughout the plant) will be used for in silico analyzes in order to select the sequences of their respective promoters. Subsequently, a specific or even degenerate primers will be used for further PCR amplification and cloning of the previously selected promoters sequences. After cloning, sequencing of the promoters will be performed. At the end we expect to create a database already named as PROMOTEROME, containing the expression data and a sequence of each of the promoters here studied. The data generated here could be used by other research groups that share the same interest in plant biotechnology, as well as in a next phase of the PROMOTEROME project to carry out the validation of some of these promoters through the phusion with reporter genes in order to validated promoter driven expression through transformation of model plants or even construction of vector and transformation of sugarcane plants. (AU)