As global demand for food and energy rises, extreme weather and environmental stress are making it harder to maintain crop yields. Traditional breeding is slow and labor-intensive, but plant bioengineering offers a faster, more precise path to developing resilient, high-yielding crops.

Now, in a major breakthrough, researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation have revolutionized this process using automation. By leveraging a biofoundry a robotics-driven laboratory integrating computer-aided design and informatics they’ve created a high-throughput system to accelerate plant genetic engineering.

This automated platform, called FAST-PB (Fast, Automated, Scalable, and High-Throughput Plant Bioengineering), enables rapid design, testing, and deployment of genetic changes in plants. The team used it to significantly increase oil production in plant cells and whole plants, laying the groundwork for engineering crops optimized for bioenergy and sustainability.

If we can use robots for plant bioengineering, that’s a game changer, said Matthew Hudson, CABBI Co-PI and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It allows us to develop better bioenergy crops more quickly.

The project, published in The Plant Cell, was led by Jia Dong, with contributions from researchers at the University of Illinois, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Brookhaven National Laboratory all part of the DOE-funded CABBI center.

Focusing on enhancing vegetative lipid production, a key trait for bioenergy crops, the team tackled a major bottleneck in plant engineering: assembling and testing multi-gene constructs. Using the Illinois Biological Foundry for Advanced Biomanufacturing , they automated three core processes:

1.Protoplast isolation and gene editing – allowing rapid gene function testing in plant cells.
2. Tissue culture and regeneration – producing engineered plants with higher oil content.
3. Single-cell mass spectrometry – using AI-assisted analysis to profile cellular metabolism and identify successful edits.

By combining synthetic biology, robotics, and single-cell lipidomics, the FAST-PB system marks a significant leap forward in plant metabolic engineering. It reduces time, labor, and cost, enabling faster development of crops that are more productive, resilient, and suited for biofuel production.

This platform accelerates discoveries in plant genomics and bioengineering, said Dong. it helps us quickly develop crops that produce more food and energy contributing to food security, energy independence, and a sustainable bioeconomy.

This innovation directly supports CABBI’s mission to transform agriculture and bioenergy through advanced plant bioengineering creating more efficient, resilient, and scalable solutions for a growing world.

Source: https://chemistry.illinois.edu/news/2025-04-11/chemistry-researchers-are-part-cabbi-team-working-revolutionize-plant