Viruses deliver gene-editing tools into wheat's complex genome
Qiao JH, Gao Q, Wang XB
Crispr
Wheat breeders have spent decades trying to make the crop more resilient to heat and drought, and the genetic complexity of wheat has made precise editing nearly impossible at scale until now.
CRISPR is a tool that lets scientists make precise changes to a plant's DNA, but getting those tools inside the plant has always been the hard part. Researchers figured out that certain plant viruses are naturally good at traveling through plant tissue, so they're hitching the gene-editing machinery to those viruses like a delivery truck. This approach was recently used to make permanent, inherited changes in wheat, which is notoriously tricky to edit because it has three times the genetic material of most plants.
Key Findings
Virus-induced genome editing (VIGE) has advanced from proof-of-concept in model plants to practical application in agricultural crops.
A recent breakthrough achieved heritable genome edits in hexaploid wheat, a crop with a highly complex genome that has resisted conventional CRISPR delivery methods.
VIGE bypasses plant transformation and tissue culture, the two biggest bottlenecks limiting CRISPR's use across diverse crop genotypes.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists are using plant viruses as delivery vehicles to carry gene-editing tools directly into crops, skipping the slow, costly lab transformation process that has long bottlenecked CRISPR's use in agriculture. A key recent milestone: heritable edits achieved in hexaploid wheat, one of the world's most important and genetically complex food crops.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Virus-induced genome editing: toward crop breeding applications.
CRISPR-Cas-based genome editing has revolutionized precise genome manipulation in plants, yet its practical application is still constrained by the inefficient delivery of editing reagents across d...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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