(MIT Technology Review) Green Revolution Redux

In the 1960s, Norman Borlaug, an American biologist, helped spark a period of transformative agricultural innovation known as the Green Revolution by selectively breeding a grain-packed, dwarf variety of wheat. (He would win a Nobel Peace Prize for this work.) In Asia, the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) had similar success with rice.

But the Green Revolution had its limits—only so much yield could be coaxed from plants using conventional breeding techniques. Breeding gene pools are limited by sexual compatibility, and it’s also difficult to control which traits will be passed on. Plus, crossbreeding new varieties to produce desirable traits can take decades.

Even today, with more precise gene-editing technologies like CRISPR, the lab-to-seed product life cycle can take 10 to 15 years, according to Keith Slotkin, a biological sciences professor at the University of Missouri and principal investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. To shave time, Slotkin’s lab recently developed a more efficient genome-editing technique, transposase-assisted target-site integration, or TATSI. When coupled with CRISPR, TATSI enables scientists to insert a piece of DNA into a plant’s genome more precisely. Instead of having it randomly inserted, which can require growing and testing many iterations of a plant to determine the right location, “we can predetermine exactly where in the genome we want it inserted,” Slotkin explains. Such precision could save years on the time it takes for new plant varieties to make it from the lab to federally approved seed products.

Read the full MIT Technology Review article below.