Supercharged Tool for Developing Tastier, More Resilient Crops

China Agricultural University researchers reported their success in improving prime editing, a powerful technique for editing genes. The enhanced prime editing system allows researchers to make specific changes to rice genes, potentially leading to tastier, more disease-resistant, or higher-yielding varieties. The results are available in the Journal of Integrative Plant Biology.

The research team developed versions of the prime editing tool using four types of prime editors generated using evolved and engineered reverse transcriptase (RT) variants from three various sources. One version, called PE6c, with an evolved and engineered RT variant from the yeast Tf1 retrotransposons, showed the highest editing efficiency reaching over 3 times more than the previous tool. The other types also showed promising prime-editing efficiencies, indicating that all the prime editors tested has the potential to help breeders develop rice varieties with desirable traits.