Skip to Content

Chinese Researchers Stop Wheat Disease with Gene Editing

Researchers have created wheat that is resistant to a common disease, using advanced gene editing methods.
July 21, 2014

Advanced genome-editing techniques have been used to create a strain of wheat resistant to a destructive fungal pathogen—called powdery mildew—that is a major bane to the world’s top food source, according to scientists at one of China’s leading centers for agricultural research.

Seeds of hope: Chinese researchers led by Caixia Gao have developed genetically modified wheat far more able to withstand powdery mildew.

To stop the mildew, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences deleted genes that encode proteins that repress defenses against the mildew. The work promises to someday make wheat more resistant to the disease, which is typically controlled through the heavy use of fungicides. It also represents an important achievement in using genome editing tools to engineer food crops without inserting foreign genes—a flashpoint for opposition to genetically modified crops.

The gene-deletion trick is particularly tough to do in wheat because the plant has a hexaploid genome—that is, it has three similar copies of most of its genes. That means multiple genes must be disabled or the trait will not be changed. Using gene-editing tools known as TALENs and CRISPR, the researchers were able to do that without changing anything else or adding genes from other organisms.

“We now caught all three copies, and only by knocking out all three copies can we get this [mildew]-resistant phenotype,” says Caixia Gao, who heads a gene-editing research group at the State Key Laboratory of Plant Cell and Chromosome Engineering at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology in Beijing.

A paper describing the results appears in Nature Biotechnology.

“This is very, very interesting; it is quite an accomplishment to knock out all three genes at the same time,” says Xing-Wang Deng, who heads a joint research center for plant molecular genetics and agricultural biotech at Peking University and Yale. “And this could be considered as a nontransgenic technology, so that can be very significant. I hope the government would not consider this transgenic, because the end result is no different than a natural mutation.”

There are currently no commercially planted varieties of genetically modified wheat anywhere in the world. And while many farmers are clamoring for access to such strains, genetically modified wheat remains highly controversial. Indeed, it’s not clear is whether Gao’s promising strain of wheat will make it out of the greenhouses in Beijing.

Gao says she has filed a global patent on the technology, suggesting it could be licensed. But there are no field trials planned yet. While China has greatly increased investments in basic biotech research, including for genetically modified crops, no new field trials of genetically engineered plants have been approved in more than a year as the government tries to mollify public concern over GMOs.

Gao says gene editing can provide very efficient tools for basic research and crop improvement, including in complex organisms like wheat. “And it can be without the controversy,” she says.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.