The lab making food healthier and medicine cheaper
Dr Nicola Patron's quest for the perfect lettuce.
This office is a little different.
Stevie Wonder’s psychedelic shades bounce light at you from a Rolling Stone cover on the wall. Next to him is a framed jigsaw of Patron Lab members, whose smiles shine through tessellated pieces.
Near the window hangs a geometric artwork by Karen Ingram, depicting the plant Nicotiana benthamiana. The lab makes Nicotiana into a living workshop – a host on which to grow medicinal or agriculturally useful compounds.
Here is where engineering, biology and art overlap.
Benthamiana as Biofoundry is an artistic interpretation by Karen Ingram inspired by research conducted in the Patron Lab.
Benthamiana as Biofoundry is an artistic interpretation by Karen Ingram inspired by research conducted in the Patron Lab.
Dr Nicola Patron is at the confluence of these fields. Sitting beneath a waterfall of devil’s ivy, she speaks of synthetic biology, seeds from space, and fungal-resistant crops. Her voice is soft and exacting.
After founding her lab at Norwich’s Earlham Institute, Nicola has moved the group to Cambridge, where she’s now Associate Professor in Plant Sciences and the head of the Plant Molecular Engineering Group.
Despite her green fingers, Nicola’s childhood dream of being an astrophysicist was a persistent one. At 17, she was part of a citizen science programme that sent seeds to the International Space Station. Nicola got her hands on the seeds that came back to Earth, and checked to see if they could still grow.
“It was the first experimental data I ever had. It was so fun. At the same time, I was volunteering for a homeless charity, which made me think about food security and distribution. The combination of these two things shifted what I wanted to do: biological sciences suddenly seemed relevant.”
Young Nicola was a few years early for the birth of bioengineering, but that’s where her instincts pointed. Technology has since caught up with her ideas. Nicola can now apply engineering principles to biological systems, and guide how plant genes are expressed.
In other words, she gets plants to do what we want them to.
The path to better resistance
“Plants didn’t evolve to be crops. The things we need crops to do are quite different to the things they do naturally.”
For a long time, our agriculture has maximised yield. We picked crops without considering their full range of traits, haphazardly selecting the biggest, juiciest specimens. We now know that in the natural population of our most vital crops, diverse traits exist. Useful traits that we didn’t bring into agriculture. The ability to resist disease and fungal pathogens, for instance, may have been left by the wayside when we took crops out of their wild context.
So, how can we quickly re-integrate these forgotten traits into our current crops? Breeding our crops with preferential traits could take 25 years. But gene editing could do it in 5. We just need to figure out which genes to focus on.
Nicola’s lab has started a collaboration in this direction, with Katherine Denby at the University of York and researchers at the John Innes Centre. They are working on the most valuable leafy vegetable in the UK: lettuce.
Fungal pathogens are a big risk for lettuces, and can lead to massive losses in yield. Lettuces vary in the amount of resistance they have to fungus. This resistance isn’t determined by one gene, but a gene network, where genes regulate each other in a complex, obscure process.
Nicola wants to find out which genes are key to a successful resistance. Wild lettuces might inspire chemical production to fight the fungus, or encourage infected parts of the plant to die off. But to have enough energy to fight pathogens, lettuces also suppress growth – not a great quality for a crop.
Humanity’s ideal lettuce would be resistant to fungus, and able to prioritise growth above all else: giving us the biggest, most delicious leaves in the shortest possible time. Nicola is hunting for the genes which might inspire this kind of lettuce.
To speed up this search, she can send candidate genes to her collaborators, who will plug it into mathematical models, and simulate what would happen to a lettuce if the influence of this gene increased. Based on this model, they can predict the phenotype – how a lettuce would look and behave if allowed to grow.
Finally, Nicola can work on encoding this recipe into a piece of DNA, which can be inserted into the lettuce genome. The resulting lettuce will bear out Nicola’s predictions: did they find the right gene? When they do, bingo: fungal-resistant lettuce.
The implications of a successful search could be transformative for humanity’s food production.
“The ultimate goal is to find a system conserved not just in lettuce, but in lots of crops. Then we’d have a way of inspiring fungal-resistance in many plants.”
Nicola in her office at Plant Sciences
Nicola in her office at Plant Sciences
Plants as medicine
Humanity has been using plants as medicine since time immemorial. Molecules produced by plants can act as anti-inflammatories or combat cancer.
In another part of Nicola’s work, she’s trying to identify novel plant-based medicines and sustainable ways to produce them.
“In some cases, the specific molecules responsible for natural remedies are known,” Nicola says. “In others, they’ve never been discovered.”
Some plant products are medically useful, but aren’t easy to mass produce. For example: Madagascan Periwinkle makes two molecules useful for treating Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer that develops in the lymphatic system. The problem is, only 0.002% of the Periwinkle’s weight is made up of those molecules, making it far harder to harvest at scale. The drug has a high price as a result.
Another chemotherapeutic comes from the Yew tree: Taxol. Just 10 years after its discovery in the 1980s, the tree went from a species of least concern to being on the IUCN’s red list, for those at high risk of extinction. People had been tearing off pieces of Yew bark to get to the precious Taxol. Fortunately, as our technology advanced, we were able to culture cells from the Yew tree and harvest Taxol more sustainably.
More widely, synthetic biologists are trying to understand how plants make these medically useful molecules. When they find the genes responsible, they can program another organism to produce that molecule with high efficiency and low cost. A new kind of host – a bioproduction system – whose purpose is to pour its resources into creating as much of a chosen molecule as possible.
That’s what Nicola is doing with Nicotiana benthamiana, a cousin of tobacco. She describes the process as more like “nudging and nurturing” than building a machine. With enough patience and knowhow, she can cajole the plant to focus on a new goal.
“Giving a plant a new set of instructions is relatively easy. It’s much more difficult to get it to pour energy into what you want, and forget about the things it usually does. Getting plants to disregard flowers and seeds is hard.”
Scientists like Nicola are cultivating a new kind of biotechnology, where we can read nature’s blueprints and direct its energy to more potent ends.
Nicola in her office
Nicola in her office
Being Black in Plant Science
Nicola hails from Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. This simple fact makes her a rarity in plant sciences.
In this country, there are vanishingly few plant science graduates who are both UK-born and people of colour. Indeed, as Nicola says, if we take out students recruited from overseas, the number “rounds to zero”.
“I was almost always the only person of colour in our lab or Department. You can go to a huge, international plant sciences conference and still be the only Black person.”
In response to this situation, Nicola co-founded Black in Plant Science with Steven Spoel and Yoselin Benitez-Alfonso.
The organisation aims to build a community where Black researchers never have to feel alone. They want to both retain Black talent and encourage more people of colour to get involved in the discipline.
In just over a year, Black in Plant Science has set down a wide root network. New funding has enabled them to offer placements for undergraduates, helping young people of colour to get research experience and prepare them for further studies. They’re also working with experts in education to look at the demographics of where and how people study plant sciences.
“We want to understand what the barriers are, and what people find threatening or exclusive.”
“Getting together with other members of Black in Plant Science is so nice. It’s weirdly relaxing, not being the only person of colour in the room – not to feel quite so different. To be surrounded by people who have some understanding of the way you’ve experienced the world.”
Elsewhere, Nicola has explored the possible reasons for the underrepresentation of Black and Asian students in UK plant science. Plant science courses are often not available in the UK’s most diverse regions. If people want to study it, they have to move to the likes of Cambridge, Durham or Warwick – a potential cultural shock for a person of colour from the inner city.
Other factors might relate to Black people’s access to green spaces.
“In the UK, Black people are 4 times less likely to have a garden, or access to a good green outdoor space.”
In their mentorship programmes and celebrations of excellence, Black in Plant Science is growing a safe place for researchers, whatever their heritage. Such groups will make academic systems smarter, more empathetic, and more fruitful.
For a field to miss out on the energy and expertise of people like Nicola is a tragedy. Labs like hers are making our food healthier and medicines cheaper. Not to mention lettuces that are, as Stevie Wonder might say, lovely, wonderful and precious.
Published on 16 December 2024
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