Chinese Scientists Develop All-in-One Platform for Crop Trait Stacking

A research team led by Gao Caixia at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a new genome engineering platform that enables multiple desirable traits to be combined in a single crop variety more efficiently. The platform, called TRIM, integrates gene knockout, small-scale precise sequence editing, and large-scale chromosome engineering into a single platform.

The team first created a precise gene knockout tool known as twin prime editing (twinPE)-mediated gene knockout (TKO), which inserts stop codons into target genes. In rice plants, TKO achieved an average single-gene knockout efficiency of 96.8%. The researchers also developed 10 orthogonal TKO systems capable of simultaneously disabling up to 10 genes. Building on this, they developed the TRIM platform, which combines multiple genome-editing functions within a single framework.

The researchers reported that TRIM1 simultaneously knocked out one gene and precisely edited three additional target sites in regenerated rice plants, achieving an efficiency of 22.8%. They also developed TRIM2, which enables large-scale DNA modifications, including insertions, deletions, replacements, inversions, and chromosomal rearrangements. According to the researchers, the TRIM platform offers a powerful tool for rapidly stacking multiple beneficial traits in crops and advancing precision breeding.

For more information, read the news article from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.