Abstract
Plant agriculture is poised at a technological inflection point. Recent advances in genome engineering make it possible to precisely alter DNA sequences in living cells, providing unprecedented control over a plant's genetic material. Potential future crops derived through genome engineering include those that better withstand pests, that have enhanced nutritional value, and that are able to grow on marginal lands. In many instances, crops with such traits will be created by altering only a few nucleotides among the billions that comprise plant genomes. As such, and with the appropriate regulatory structures in place, crops created through genome engineering might prove to be more acceptable to the public than plants that carry foreign DNA in their genomes. Public perception and the performance of the engineered crop varieties will determine the extent to which this powerful technology contributes towards securing the world's food supply.
Highlights
Over the past 100 years, technological advances have resulted in remarkable increases in agricultural productivity
New genetic variation is created through mutagenesis
Most genome engineering techniques direct the repair of DNA double-strand-breaks (DSBs), which are introduced in the genome at or near the Citation: Voytas DF, Gao C (2014) Precision Genome Engineering and Agriculture: Opportunities and Regulatory Challenges
Summary
Genome engineering is enabled by harnessing the cell’s DNA repair pathways (reviewed in [5]). Most genome engineering techniques direct the repair of DNA double-strand-breaks (DSBs), which are introduced in the genome at or near the Citation: Voytas DF, Gao C (2014) Precision Genome Engineering and Agriculture: Opportunities and Regulatory Challenges. PLOS Biology | www.plosbiology.org site where a DNA sequence modification is desired. The repair of the break can be directed to create a variety of targeted DNA sequence modifications, ranging from DNA deletions to the insertion of large arrays of transgenes. There are currently four major classes of SSNs: engineered homing endonucleases or meganucleases, zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/Cas reagents (Figure 1).
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