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A proposed regulatory framework for genome-edited crops

Nature Genetics volume 48, pages 109–111 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Crop breeding is being revolutionized by rapid progress in DNA sequencing and targeted alteration of DNA sequences by genome editing. Here we propose a regulatory framework for precision breeding with 'genome-edited crops' (GECs) so that society can fully benefit from the latest advances in plant genetics and genomics.

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Figure 1: Comparison of three breeding methodologies.

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Acknowledgements

We thank our colleagues D. Baulcombe, J. Dangl, J. Jones, O. Leyser, X. Meng, X. Yang and B. Hu for discussion. The authors have no direct competing financial interests. D.W. is a co-founder and shareholder of Computomics, which provides bioinformatics services primarily to the breeding industry. D.W. has been an adviser to Bayer Crop Sciences in the past. R.N.B. is on the Board of Directors for Symbiota Co. and Performance Plants, Inc. and is Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) for Kultevat Co. S.H. is supported by funding from the Ministry of Sciences and Technologies (the 973 Program; 2012CB113900) and the Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS-ASTIP-2015-AGISCAAS). All of the funding to D.W. comes from governmental or nonprofit sources (Max Planck Society, European Research Council, German Research Council DFG, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation/2Blades Foundation).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Shenzhen, China

    Sanwen Huang

  2. Institute of Vegetables and Flowers, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Key Laboratory of Biology and Genetic Improvement of Horticultural Crops of the Ministry of Agriculture, Sino-Dutch Joint Laboratory of Horticultural Genomics, Beijing, China

    Sanwen Huang

  3. Department of Molecular Biology, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany

    Detlef Weigel

  4. World Food Center at the University of California, Davis, California, USA

    Roger N Beachy

  5. State Key Laboratory of Plant Genomics and National Center for Plant Gene Research (Beijing), Beijing, China

    Jiayang Li

  6. Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Jiayang Li

Authors
  1. Sanwen Huang
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  2. Detlef Weigel
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  3. Roger N Beachy
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  4. Jiayang Li
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Sanwen Huang, Detlef Weigel, Roger N Beachy or Jiayang Li.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Table 1

Forty-seven important crop species for which whole-genome sequences are available. (PDF 146 kb)

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Huang, S., Weigel, D., Beachy, R. et al. A proposed regulatory framework for genome-edited crops. Nat Genet 48, 109–111 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3484

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