AI designed Artificial Protein Binders to control leaf transpiration in a changing climate. – ADAPT

Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool to solve complex biological problems and it has been fastly growing in the last years. In biological problems related with structural biology, AI strongly contributed to solve key issues such as ab initio protein design. This dramatically changed this field of research opening the door to a whole set of possibilities that were previously not possible to address. In this context, plant biology is also rapidly moving to exploit all the possibilities offered by AI. In the ADAPT project we want to use AI to develop a new set of biotechnological tools to control a key physiological parameter in plants, leaf gas exchanges and transpiration. Indeed, leaf gas exchanges are central to control CO2 absorption and fixation through photosynthesis and have a strong and direct impact on plant biomass production. Further, leaf transpiration is a key parameter to control plant water loss being essential for plant responses to drought and elevated temperature. Leaf gas exchanges are controlled by a key anatomical structure, the stomata. These are microscopic pores at the surface of leaves that can open and close to adapt to environmental changes to optimize the tradeoff between CO2 absorption and water loss. The regulation of stomata aperture is therefore important for plant growth and therefore crop yield. In the last decades several key molecular actors regulating stomata aperture have been identified, among them some ion channels (SLAC1, ALMT12, ALMT9) and some receptors (PYR/PYL/RCAR) and signaling pathways. Therefore now we can select possible molecular targets that could be exploited to control stomata aperture and therefore leaf gas exchanges through innovative biotechnological strategies .
The development of AI in structural biology together with the power of experimental structural determination of membrane and soluble proteins by powerful technologies like cryoEm opens to the possibility to design Artificial Protein Binders able to control the activity of key proteins involved intracellular responses. The design of these binders is a type of “drug design” strategy where the “drug” is a small protein (< smaller 100 Amino Acids). The ADAPT project wants therefore to use AI to generate Artificial Protein Binders specific to selected stomatal ion channels and receptors to actively control stomata aperture. For this two partners, one from France and one from Korea, will join their complementary expertise to tackle this issue. The partners build on an established collaboration at the interface between structural biology, AI, biophysics and plant molecular physiology and developed a pipeline to address this issue.
The ADAPT project aims at developing, thank to AI, an innovative synthetic biology strategy to provide molecular tools enabling to control plant transpiration and CO2 absorption. In the context of the future climate change that will be a need of innovative biotechnological solution to be able to maintain crop production despite the changing conditions. The development of Artificial Binders to control stomata aperture could be a valuable tool to face the future challenges raised by climatic predictions and crop production.