Genome editing and CRISPR - Cas9

Genome (gene) editing covers a group of technologies that can add, remove, or otherwise alter an organism's DNA at chosen, specific locations in its genome - a fundamentally more precise operation than earlier, comparatively blunt genetic-engineering approaches, which typically had far less control over exactly where in the genome new DNA ended up. Several distinct genome-editing approaches have been developed over time, but the most recent and by far the most widely adopted is CRISPR-Cas9 - short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, paired with the CRISPR-associated protein Cas9. Its rapid, near-universal adoption across biology reflects four practical advantages over older editing methods: it is faster, cheaper, more accurate, and more efficient. In plant biology specifically, rice was among the very first species used to demonstrate that CRISPR-mediated targeted mutagenesis and gene replacement genuinely work in a real crop plant, not just in cultured cells. One striking demonstration of just how far this precision can go: researchers Imtiyaz Khanday and Venkatesan Sundaresan and their colleagues used CRISPR-based gene editing to re-engineer rice so that it switched from its normal sexual mode of reproduction to an asexual one - a …