I would say the biggest problem in
agriculture today is that we have to
come up with new ways to improve plant
breeding to make its outcomes more
predictable and most importantly to
increase yields over the next 50 years
and the reason for this is of course is
that the human population is growing
tremendously exceeding 9 billion by 2050
and one of the greatest challenges that
breeders have is making these
incremental improvements in yield over
several years of breeding which can take
upwards of 10 to 15 years to release new
varieties that actually make a
difference and so one of the greatest
limitations on breeders being able to
achieve these increases is that the
variation that exists the DNA variation
that affects genes that control yield
traits is quite limited nature has done
a reasonable job of providing us with
alleles what we call variants of genes
that can be used by breeders and
selected in different combinations to
make these improvements in yield traits
for all crops but that pro- that
variation that nature has provided is
still extremely limited because it's
caused by rare occurring DNA mutations
lucky hits if you will that then have to
be identified through rigorous
evaluations in the fields so through the
most recent development of genome
editing technology we started to think
about how we might be able to enhance
the type of DNA variation that breeders
need so using genome editing technology
we were able to create random cuts using
the molecular scissors in a defined
region of this regulatory DNA and those
random cuts would then give us a whole
range of different types of mutations
and this range of mutations gave us a
range of affect on the activity of the
genes which then translated to a range
and here's what's important a range of trait
variation we anticipate that this is
going to be a tool that breeders can use
in many major crops from wheat, to rice,
to soybean, to corn not only tomato and
this is because again we're dealing with
limited genetic variation and going
directly into those crops and the genes
that control those major yield traits we
can improve genetic variation that they
can now use in their breeding programs.
