The Agricultural Biotechnology Council of Australia is an industry initiative established to increase public awareness of, and encourage informed debate and decision-making about, gene technology.
A team of researchers from Western Australia has successfully used new gene-editing techniques to develop nitrogen use efficient barley lines – and they have now set their sights on wheat and other crop traits.
Yield potential, flowering time and plant height in both barley and wheat are among the new individual traits being fast-tracked for breeding programs.
This is the first successful example of applying CRISPR/Cas9 techniques to Australian commercial crop varieties.
“Only a handful of laboratories worldwide utilise this technology in winter cereals,” says Dr Yong Han, group leader for molecular genetics with WA’s Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development.
“CRISPR gene editing can precisely modify the target gene, or genes, in current crop varieties and improve agronomic traits with reduced breeding time and high precision,” Dr Han says.
Working with the Western Crop Genetics Alliance at Murdoch University, Dr Han’s team have developed barley materials for testing and trials with increased yield potential, nitrogen use efficiency, or altered plant stature, phenology and coleoptile length.
The research team will now actively liaise with plant breeders to engage them in the process as the first prototypes undergo glasshouse trials this year.
In countries including Australia, the US, Brazil, Argentina, United Kingdom and Japan, any crops resulting from this particular gene-editing technique are not classed as genetically modified organisms, which makes the commercialisation and marketing pathway much clearer.
GM wheat approved for cultivation in Brazil
The Argentinean company behind the development of a GM drought-tolerant wheat, Bioceres, has announced the latest global approval for the new commodity.
CTNBio, the National Biosafety Commission of Brazil’s Ministry of Science, has finalised its safety evaluation of the crop, known as HB4 Wheat, and approved it for both commercial use and cultivation, adding to the food and feed use approval achieved in the country in 2021.
Brazil now joins Argentina in cultivating the GM wheat variety. Together, the two countries plant 90 per cent of South America’s wheat acreage.
This latest approval adds to the food and feed use approvals achieved in Australia, the US, Colombia, New Zealand, South Africa, Nigeria and Indonesia.
According to Bioceres, the approval will allow their collaboration with EMBRAPA (Brazil’s Agricultural Research Corporation) to fast-track the development of subtropical wheat varieties to increase the supply of local materials in regions within Brazil where they are currently limited by water availability.
Bioceres claims the HB4 technology is a key tool in the adaptation of farming systems to a more extreme climate, having already proven to deliver more than 40 per cent yield increases in environments under severe water stress, based on results from Argentina’s recent drought-affected crop.
Deeper roots for greater yields using gene editing in wheat
Wheat adapted to have longer root growth, resulting in more biomass and higher grain yield, has been developed using the gene editing technology CRISPR/Cas9, according to a recent announcement by an international research team including scientists from the US, China, Sweden, Argentina and Israel.
The researchers discovered the gene family – known as OPRIII – which affects the root structure of wheat, and that different copies of these genes affect root length.
“The duplication of the OPRIII genes results in increased production of a plant hormone called Jasmonic acid that causes, among other processes, the accelerated production of lateral roots,” says Distinguished Professor Jorge Dubcovsky, from the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis.
“Different dosages of these genes can be used to obtain different roots.”
To get longer roots, the team of researchers used CRISPR/Cas9 technology to eliminate some of the OPRIII genes that were duplicated in wheat lines with shorter roots.
By contrast, increasing the copies of these genes caused shorter and more branched roots. But inserting a rye chromosome resulted in decreased OPRIII wheat genes, causing longer roots.
“Fine-tuning the dosage of the OPRIII genes can allow us to engineer root systems that are adapted to drought, to normal conditions, to different scenarios,” says Gilad Gabay, a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Davis, and the lead author on a paper published in the journal Nature Communications about the work.