When you use CRISPR gene editing on crop plants, you can do “some pretty cool things,” says Timothy Kelliher, PhD, head of crop trait and technology discovery at Syngenta Seeds. You can change the structure of chromosomes, add large amounts of genetic material, move genes around, turn genes on and off, and fine-tune gene expression. And yet, Kelliher admits, inefficiency in bringing these cool things to commercial agricultural products is “still a problem.”
To realize agricultural applications of gene editing, developers are managing complex traits, coping with regulatory uncertainties, and refining in silico models.