Developing a model system to sustain ex vivo chloroplast function

Chloroplasts are critical organelles in plants and algae responsible for accumulating biomass through photosynthetic carbon fixation and cellular maintenance through metabolism in the cell. Chloroplasts are increasingly appreciated for their role in biomanufacturing, as they can produce many useful molecules, and a deeper understanding of chloroplast regulation and function would provide more insight for the biotechnological applications of these organelles. However, traditional genetic approaches to manipulate chloroplasts are slow, and generation of transgenic organisms to study their function can take weeks to months, significantly delaying the pace of research. To develop chloroplasts themselves as a quicker and more defined platform, we isolated chloroplasts from the green algae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii , and examined their photosynthetic function after extraction. Combined with a metabolic modeling approach using flux-balance analysis, we identified key metabolic reactions essential to chloroplast function and leveraged this information into reagents that can be used in a “chloroplast media” capable of maintaining chloroplast photosynthetic function over time ex vivo compared to buffer alone. We envision this could serve as a model platform to enable more rapid design-build-test-learn cycles to study and improve chloroplast function and potentially as a foundation for the bottom-up design of a synthetic organelle-containing cell.