July 23, 2014
Chinese researchers create fungal pathogen-resistant wheat
The Chinese Academy of Sciences used advanced genome-editing techniques to create a strain of wheat resistant to a destructive fungal pathogen- powdery mildew.
To stop the mildew, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences deleted genes, which encode proteins that repress defence against the mildew. The work holds the promise to make wheat more resistant to the disease, which is typically controlled through the heavy use of fungicides.
It also represents an important achievement in using genome editing tools to engineer food crops without inserting foreign genes- a flashpoint for opposition to genetically modified crops.
As wheat has three genomes, deletions of genes are extremely tough. Using gene-editing tools - TALENs and CRISPR, the researchers were able to do it without changing anything else or adding genes from other organisms.
"We now caught all three copies, and only by knocking out all three copies can we get this [mildew]-resistant phenotype," says Caixia Gao, head of a gene-editing research group at the State Key Laboratory of Plant Cell and Chromosome Engineering at the Institute of Microbiology in Beijing.