CRISPR Crops: The Future of Agriculture

Berkeley Scientific: the journal of young scientists

article

Emily Pearlman

DOI  :  10.5070/BS3242049340

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: University of California, Berkeley

【 摘 要 】

Corn: the crop America knows and loves… or so we think.Modern corn looks so different from its original form, a wildgrass called teosinte, that you would be hard-pressed to recognizethe two are related. Over thousands of years of directed evolution,teosinte’s tiny ears and indigestible kernels morphed into maize’slarge ears, each with as many as 500 juicy kernels (Fig. 1).1 Corn isjust one example of human-directed evolution of plants; we havebeen domesticating and cultivating crop species since the beginning of civilization. Although the technology used to selectivelybreed plants has grown more advanced over time, the basic principle remains the same—harnessing existing variation in a speciesto increase the prevalence of traits we consider “desirable,” such aslarger ears on corn. Historically, this was achieved by successiverounds of breeding; today, with powerful genome editing tools atour fingertips, we have the ability to attain the same (and moredrastic) results with less time and effort.

【 授权许可】

Unknown