The first time I saw a primitive carrot
The first time I saw a primitive carrot, I thought we’d all starve if we had to eat that. Primitive corn was just as menial, and probably provides the starkest example of domestic plant evolution.
Nine thousand years ago corn looked more like a dried bean pod than the juicy modern corn, 1000-times larger, that lines our supermarket produce aisle.
Believe it or not, these and many other foods were domesticated by farmers through genetic modification to become what we eat today.
Classical plant breeding techniques used by farmers over centuries increased the quality and yield of crops for human consumption.
We can’t wait that long anymore.
Human populations are much larger today, landscapes are less productive and food security has become one of our greatest global challenges.
By the middle of this century human population is predicted to reach almost 10 billion people, resulting in an imbalance between our needs and the earth’s resources and capabilities to provide.
Climate changes, pests and diseases are also current threats to our food supplies.
A race for survival
“Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”. (World Food Summit, 1996).
Scientists have developed ways to increase crop resilience and yield by speeding up classical breeding to introduce novel characteristics to plants in a time efficient manner.
Plant genomes are very complex though and modification is still time consuming, unspecific and costly.
The advent of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and advances in plant molecular biotechnology have the capacity to introduce traits into plants quicker and more specifically.
Originally a chemist, I turned my efforts to discovering methods to improve crop resilience and yield.
I use CRISPR-Cas9 to sustain a crop that, through domestic breeding, lost its seeds: Bananas, a staple food source, particularly in developing communities around the world.
Bananas are vegetatively propagated which means the plant does not make seeds and cannot go through conventional breeding techniques.
Cavendish bananas are threatened by Panama disease (also known as TR4), a fungal pathogen that is resistant to fungicide.
The only way to make it resistant is to introduce genes that give it resistance against the disease.
It can take a team of highly qualified scientists up to three years to make a number of gene edited banana plants and study the effect of transferring various “resistant” genes.
Failure of a method to introduce the gene to the banana genome can add up to two more years to the process.
Gene editing technologies that allow specific insertion of genes in an efficient manner are important to food security.
My time machine
I can discover in five to seven days if a gene-editing method has worked by using the native Australian tobacco plant (Nicotiana benthamiana).
Australian tobacco is used in labs and biotech industries as a research tool and bio-factory.
Genes of interest are injected into the backside of a leaf and cell machinery works its magic to give us results within the week.
I have already used this approach to prove CRISPR-Cas9 methods that efficiently abolish gene activity in important crops such as banana, rice and tomato.
As it stands now, Panama disease can wipe out the entire global Cavendish banana industry; climate changes can destroy or reduce numerous crops, and all this with our rate of population growth is reducing availability of useable land for food production.
By developing and testing methods within a short period of time I hope to develop more efficient methods to introduce genes to plants that will increase their yield, make them more resilient to pests and drought tolerant.
Speeding up domestication of plant crops presents a solution to our sustainability challenge.
