Our lab is located in lovely Bavaria, Germany, at the Technical University of Munich, location Freising. We are a newcomer lab associated with the professorship Biotechnology of Horticultural Crops at the Department of Molecular Life Sciences.

We use synthetic biology to engineer sustainable crops.

Feeding a growing world population is a 21st century challenge because production of the major food crops must increase 50% in the next 25 years. Current breeding techniques are starting to plateau - achieving already less than 1% yield gain per year – and will likely not meet demand. Therefore, application of new tools is urgent, and synthetic biology and metabolic engineering may offer solutions to today’s agricultural deficits.

Plants have evolved under nutrient-limiting conditions (e.g., nitrogen) but were awash with carbon. The balance between carbon and other nutrients has switched to the opposite in modern cropping systems because fertilization and irrigation cause crops to be carbon limited. The research group “Crop Synthetic biology” explores strategies to increase carbon availability in plants by increasing the carbon fixation rate and cutting respiratory losses.

Synthetic biology is a new tool to redesign (or build new) biological systems. It follows the circular principle of “design – build – test – learn” to engineer a system towards desired functions and allows to learn and benefit from it. The diverse tool set of SynBio includes continuous directed evolution, a powerful approach to evolve enzyme functions in a short timeframe. To engineer plant proteins, we use yeast as a platform organism because the physiological conditions are close to plants and the short generation time allows fast directed evolution.