For thousands of years humans have been tinkering with plant genetics, even when they didn’t realize that is what they were doing, in an effort to make stronger, healthier crops that endured climates better, and produced more.
Zachary Nimchuk, assistant professor of biological sciences and a member of the faculty of health sciences at Virginia Tech, is working with a technology that refines the process by honing in on individual genes within a plant’s DNA.
Nimchuk builds on a technology developed by George Church, a professor of genetics at the Harvard Medical School that knocks out specific genes in a plant’s DNA to get rid of a trait that is unwanted, or add a trait that is desirable. This process was discovered by looking at bacteria and how they take the DNA of invading viruses and use it to immunize themselves against further attacks.
“We realized the system could be used as a way to edit and modify genomes from higher organisms,” Nimchuk said. “Unlike traditional crossing of plants which may allow for the transmission of both desired and undesired traits, we are taking out the specific traits we don’t want, or adding what we do want, without removing or adding additional unwanted traits. And we’re doing it without introducing any foreign DNA into the plant meaning it’s not a genetically modified organism as people understand GMO, in the traditional sense.”
The technology is a system made up of two components, an enzyme and RNA. The enzyme, CAS9, has the ability to chop up DNA and, as Church’s group originally showed, RNA can guide and bind the enzyme to a target gene. The chewing activity within the enzyme will chop the DNA in half which allows scientists to install repair genes. The process has the effect of allowing the removal of a very specific unwanted trait and replacing it with a very specific desired trait allowing researchers to determine the role of the removed gene.
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Source: Virginia Tech
