Biotech Updates

Plants are constantly exposed to various biotic and abiotic stresses. Thus, scientists continue to develop tools that help improve the field of plant breeding. These new tools and practices are referred to as plant breeding innovations, which include transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR), zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs), and homing endonucleases or meganucleases.

Bt Cotton Key in Eradicating Destructive Pest from the US and Mexico

A powerful combination of genetically engineered cotton and traditional pest control strategies successfully eliminated pink bollworm from the continental U.S. and Mexico, reported by study leader Bruce Tabashnik and colleagues in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

CSIRO "Gene Sandwich" to Boost Wheat Resistance to Rust

Researchers at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have led an international effort to develop wheat plants with a stronger and potentially more durable level of resistance against rust diseases by "stacking" five resistance genes together.

Scientists Boost Vegetable Oil Production in Plant Leaves

Plants synthesize fatty acids in their leaves by using light. Prof. Thelen and his team used the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas-9 to turn off three small proteins in Arabidopsis that restrain oil production in the leaves. This frees up the plant to produce higher amounts of triacyglycerol in its leaves instead of on its seeds. Triacyglycerol is the main component of vegetable oil.