For millennia, developing resilient crops relied on pollination by nature or humans—making the process long and often costly. Now, scientists from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have reimagined the pollination process by developing a new system that uses gene editing to create flowers that can be easily pollinated by AI-controlled robots working round the clock.
The system, known as Genome Editing with Artificial-Intelligence-based Robots (GEAIR), addresses a long-standing pollination hurdle: Hybrid breeding—which involves cross-pollination between different parent plants—produces higher-yielding, hardier crops. However, it relies on slow, costly manual labor to manage the pollination since recessed stigmas (female organs) and complex floral structures in key crops like tomatoes and soybeans have stymied robotic automation.
Drawing inspiration from the Green Revolution—when crops were reengineered for machinery—the team pioneered “crop–robot co-design” to create crops well-adapted to robotic technology.
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The result is plants that are both male-sterile (eliminating the need for emasculation) and have protruding stigmas, making them easy for robots to access.
