Dr. Caixia Gao is Principal Investigator of the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB), Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prior to joining IGDB in 2009, she served as Research Scientist of DLF’s biotechnology group in Denmark, where she worked in plant genetic transformation and molecular biology. She completed her Ph.D. in Plant Genetics from China Agricultural University, Beijing, and her M.Sc. and B.S. degrees in Agronomy from Gansu Agricultural University, Lanzhou. Her current research mainly focuses on developing novel technologies to achieve efficient and specific genome engineering, and applying them to study the function of genes and modify plant traits for high-quality, disease resistance and stress tolerance in crop species.

Genome editing with programmable nucleases in crop plants

Crop improvement requires the constant creation and use of new allelic variants. Conventional breeding can be limited in providing the genes and alleles required to meet the agricultural challenges. In the past decade, genome editing can accelerate plant breeding by allowing the introduction of precise and predictable modifications directly in an elite background. The most promising utilization of the CRISPR-Cas9 system can be used to generate targeted genome modifications including mutations, insertions, replacements and chromosome rearrangements. The use of CRISPR in agriculture should be considered as simply a new breeding method that can produce identical results to conventional methods in a much more predictable, faster and even cheaper manner.