By Gabe Saldana
Editing a plant’s genes is only half the battle. Before a new, improved trait can ever reach a farmer’s field, scientists must be able to grow a whole plant from just a few edited cells — a process that can be slow, unreliable and, for some plant species, impossible.
A new study led by researchers at Texas A&M AgriLife Research, the University of Maryland and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA, describes a way to speed up that bottleneck across crops, including perennials such as citrus, strawberry, poplar and potatoes. The findings were published in Nature Communications.
The team developed a system called CRISPR-Combo, which allows scientists to edit a gene of interest and simultaneously activate the plant’s own natural “morphogenic” genes. These control how cells divide and develop into roots, shoots and eventually entire plants. Instead of inserting extra copies of these growth-promoting genes, CRISPR-Combo turns up the plant’s own version of these genes where they already sit in the genome, using the same CRISPR tool that makes the gene edit.
“Regeneration is one of the biggest roadblocks standing between a promising gene edit in the lab and a crop variety that’s actually useful to growers,” said Kranthi Mandadi, Ph.D., director of the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Weslaco and professor in the Texas A&M Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology.
Source : tamu.edu