UC San Diego

Plants serve the basic energy and food source for all living organisms on Earth and have been bred for centuries in order to maximize qualities that are desirable for humans, including organ size or yield. Fruit are the harvested product in many crops, and thus, many fruit traits have been targeted in breeding programs for decades. Current global factors such as climate change, reduced water availability or the availability of arable land, will largely impact breeding and crop yield in the 21st century, jeopardizing food security of our increasing human population. The rise of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technologies has provided new promising venues for crop improvement. More recently, ground-breaking Active Genetics tools have provided novel opportunities to explore new techniques for faster breeding and circumvent the constraints of classical Mendelian inheritance. This becomes even more important when considering that many of our crops are polyploid. As an initial step towards implementing Active Genetics in polyploid species, we need to find a configuration in which CRISPR is efficient. In this study, we have investigated different CRISPR configurations for efficiently targeting polyploid plant genomes with the goal of being able to transfer this knowledge to crops. We hope that we can then accelerate plant breeding in order to elaborate new cultivars to meet future food and yield demands.