Traditional crop breeding can be time-consuming and laborious. Brad Ringeisen, the executive director of the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) at the University of California (Berkeley and San Francisco), believes that gene editing using tools like Crispr-Cas9 is the most impactful way of ensuring that crops can withstand disasters.
“It speeds up the innovation cycles. It is a precise tool.”
Mr Ringeisen summarises the IGI’s work on disease resistance in crops: “There are a tremendous number of emerging diseases, and climate change is not helping this.”
He says gene editing is a more elegant way of tackling disease than spraying more pesticides.
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As well as disease resistance, the IGI is working on drought tolerance. A rice variety that has been gene edited to reduce the number of pores on leaves, reducing water loss, is now in field trials in Colombia. Such tests are necessary to make sure that gene edits don’t lead to unforeseen side effects in practice.
The IGI’s project is one of a number of scientific efforts to make rice less vulnerable to unpredictable water cycles. Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, for example, have developed a “scuba rice” strain that can withstand weeks of submergence in water during floods.
