Seminarios IHSM La Mayora - Diego Orzáez (IBMCP, Valencia)

Modern industrial crops are likely to expand and diversify in response to the increasing demand for bioproducts, from pharmaceuticals to pest control reagents or food additives, among others. Plant biofactories are a relatively new type of crops for which breeding programs have had very little time to operate. Furthermore, favourable traits for plant biofactories are often unconventional and different to those pursued in traditional food crops, such as humanized protein glycosylation, biocontainment, or tuneable metabolic composition. Tobacco species Nicotiana benthamiana and Nicotiana benthamiana are widely used as biofactories because of many favourable attributes. Furthermore, the non-food status considerably lessens the GMO regulatory burdens, especially under confined conditions Therefore, Nicotiana biofactories as an excellent experimental field to explore the most advanced breeding techniques and the most challenging synthetic biology approaches, with an applied perspective. In this context, the work of our group focuses on the design of improved Nicotiana biofactories by (i) improving the plant chassis via CRISPR/Cas gene editing, (ii) designing new synbio tools for controlling plant gene expression, and (iii) engineering new metabolic pathways for added value products. Biography: Diego Orzáez is Research Scientist at IBMCP-CSIC. He did his Ph.D. on Plant Programmed Cell Death (PCD) at A. Granell´s lab. As a Marie-Curie post-doc he joined E. Woltering lab in Wageningen (NL) for 2 years to study PCD in plant cell cultures. Later, he moved to Wageningen University and joined the A. Schot LMA lab for 4 years, where he started the design of plants as biofactories. In 2004, he returned to Valencia with a Ramón y Cajal contract and became CSIC Tenured Scientist in 2009. He was Adjunct Professor of the Department of Biotechnology of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) from 2009 to 2014 and now teaches at the Master of Plant Biotechnology at IBMCP. Currently, Diego co-leads the Plant Genomic and Biotechnology Group at the IBMCP-CSIC, where he oversees Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology projects aimed at designing plant biofactories of added value products.