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The future of CRISPR technologies in agriculture

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology volume 19, pages 275–276 (2018)Cite this article

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Conventional plant breeding is unlikely to meet increasing food demands and other environmental challenges. By contrast, CRISPR technology is erasing barriers to genome editing and could revolutionize plant breeding. However, to fully benefit from the CRISPR revolution, we should focus on resolving its technical and regulatory uncertainties.

Modern agriculture exemplifies how research and technology can come together to improve crop yield and quality. Although conventional breeding is now much faster than it was 50 years ago, it is likely unable to keep up with the increasing demand for food and with the global environmental challenges that we face. As long as plant breeding remains fully dependent on finding plant populations with sufficient variation and on conventional crossing approaches to introduce traits into target crops, time and resource limitations to crop improvement will persist. CRISPR technologies could surmount these limitations and accelerate plant breeding beyond what was previously imaginable. Although sometimes subjected to exaggerated headlines, the use of CRISPR in agriculture should be best considered as simply 'a new breeding method' that can produce identical results to conventional methods in a much more predictable, faster and even cheaper manner.

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Acknowledgements

The author is supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31788103) and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFD0101804).

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Plant Cell and Chromosome Engineering and Center for Genome Editing, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Caixia Gao

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  1. Caixia Gao
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Correspondence to Caixia Gao.

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Gao, C. The future of CRISPR technologies in agriculture. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 19, 275–276 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm.2018.2

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