Sweet Success: CABBI Demonstrates First Precision Breeding of Sugarcane With CRISPR/Cas9
Sugarcane is one of the most productive plants on Earth, providing 80 percent of the sugar and 30 percent of the bioethanol produced worldwide. Its size and efficient use of water and light give it tremendous potential for the production of renewable value-added bioproducts and biofuels.
But the highly complex sugarcane genome poses challenges for conventional breeding, requiring more than a decade of trials for the development of an improved cultivar.
Two published innovations by University of Florida researchers at the Department of Energy’s Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) demonstrated the first successful precision breeding of sugarcane by using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing — a far more targeted and efficient way to develop new varieties.
In the first report, led by CABBI researchers Fredy Altpeter, professor of agronomy at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS), and Ayman Eid, a postdoctoral research associate in Altpeter’s lab, demonstrated the ability to turn off variable numbers of copies of the magnesium chelatase gene, a key enzyme for chlorophyll biosynthesis in sugarcane, producing rapidly identifiable plants with light green to yellow leaves.
The second study achieved efficient and reproducible gene targeting in sugarcane, demonstrating the precise substitution of multiple copies of the target gene with a superior version, conferring herbicide resistance.
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