By Norman Martin
A research team at Texas Tech’s Davis College of Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources is embarking on an ambitious effort to rewrite how scientists improve crops, aiming to bypass some of the most persistent bottlenecks in modern plant biotechnology.
Led by Degao Liu, an assistant professor in the university’s Institute of Genomics for Crop Abiotic Stress Tolerance, the project seeks to develop genome editing methods that eliminate the need for both transgenes and tissue culture; steps that have long slowed the translation of laboratory advances into field-ready crops.
Genome editing has been widely hailed as a transformative tool for agriculture, capable of enhancing traits such as drought tolerance, pest resistance and yield. Yet its real-world application has remained constrained. Conventional approaches typically require inserting foreign DNA into plant cells and regenerating whole plants through tissue culture, a process that is time-consuming, technically demanding and often limited to a narrow range of species and genotypes.
Even after successful editing, those transgenes must be removed through multiple generations of breeding to meet regulatory standards, further extending development timelines.
The Department of Plant & Soil Science team’s project - Planttransform: Versatile Virus-Mediated, Tissue Culture-Free, Genotype-Independent Genome Editing for Solanaceous Crop Enhancement - aims to circumvent those hurdles.
Source : ttu.edu