Title: Genetically engineering a multi-organism relationshipPresenter: Eli Hornstein, Provost Doctoral Fellow, Systems and SyntheticBiology, Dept. of Plant and Microbial BiologyAbstract: Biotechnology has great potential as a tool to address pressing issues beyond the agricultural applications in wide use today. In the context of environmental conservation, I will discuss how biotechnology could provide solutions to problems that have been intractable to traditional approaches for decades. I will focus the majority of my talk on my research in progress to genetically engineer crop plants to form new symbiotic relationships with soil fungi, called mycorrhizae. Ability to form or alter mycorrhizae in agriculture can greatly increase the uptake of soil N, P, K, and water. This in turn haspotential to reduce fertilizer application, and ease consumption of land and water. I will discuss the inherent challenges of manipulating a complexrelationship that varies across interactions between multiple organisms and their environment, as well as the potential challenges of proposing to deregulate such an engineered product.