A cereal grain crop produced by a tall grass species with distinct male and female reproductive structures that yield edible kernels. It is one of the world's most important food crops and serves as a primary model organism for plant genetics, crop breeding, and understanding agronomic trait development. Its well-documented domestication history makes it invaluable for research into plant evolution and the genetic basis of crop adaptation to human cultivation.
Scientists developed a faster, more reliable method to edit the genes of elite commercial maize varieties without the slow, costly steps normally required to breed new traits into existing lines. By combining an improved CRISPR protein, targeted heat treatment after pollination, and a protein-stabilizing fusion tag, they raised editing success rates up to 33%, making precise crop improvement far more practical.
1
Post-pollination heat treatment alone boosted haploid editing rates to 19.1%, up to 12-fold higher than untreated controls.
2
Fusing the CRISPR protein with a stabilizing UBA2 domain improved editing rates 6-fold at the Waxy1 locus and 4.5-fold at the Glossy2 locus.
3
Combining UBA2 fusion with heat treatment achieved an average editing rate of 25% and a peak of 33% across multiple target sites.
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