A pot of pretty petunias will practically sell itself, but petunias don’t retain their beauty for long. A joint Israeli-American “precise breeding” project is now working toward extending the shelf-life of these popular flowers. The three-year collaboration brings together a patented plant-breeding technology called MemoGene, developed by Israel’s Danziger Innovations and the Hebrew University’s Yissum tech-transfer company, with a DNA editing platform developed by Precision Biosciences in North Carolina. The platform’s biological “scissors” will be tailored to cut open the flower’s genome at exactly the right spot for MemoGene to deliver the life-extending trait.
“It’s a perfect symbiosis, because we each have a piece of a two-piece puzzle,” says Hanne Volpin, deputy CEO and head of R&D at Danziger Innovations. “We have the technology to deliver tools to make the modification to the genome, while Precision Biosciences owns the [intellectual property] for the biological scissors that cut the genome.”
Read full, original article: U.S., Israeli Firms Collaborate to Create Genetically-Modified, Longer-Lasting Flowers
