Millennium Nucleus Center of Synthetic Biology and Plant Systems Biology – BSSV

Plants are essential to our survival as they provide food and oxygen, medicines, building materials, fuel and many other products. Despite their importance, we know relatively little about plants compared to other organisms. Plant sciences today have the complex challenge of helping solve human needs as we face major global changes such as climate change, population growth and the degradation and depletion of natural resources. Then, the challenge is to seek social and environmentally sustainable ways to meet the demand of health, food reassurance and energy security of our society.

The Millennium Nucleus Center of Synthetic Biology and Plant Systems Biology (NM-BSSV) represents a pioneering initiative in Chile to establish a center of excellence that contributes to the development of Plant Biology and Biotechnology. This initiative comes from the natural growth of the Millennium Nucleus Center in Plant Functional Genomics (NM-GFP), the first center that gathered our group. The NM-BSSV promotes problem solving from a perspective that offers: 1) an interdisciplinary nature, derived from the interaction between plant biologists, biotechnologists, microbiologists, bioinformatics experts and agronomists and 2) a reflexive approach, including dialogue and discussion on the impacts of new technologies. The NM-BSSV will use frontline approximations such as genomics, bioinformatics, systems biology and molecular biology to address its scientific objectives.