Aussie researchers have brought us a crucial step closer to scientifically-modified super-crops, implanting genetic material into plants via the root for the first time.
It might sound a small thing to the layperson, but the University of Queensland team behind the development aren’t thinking small about its potential.
“This is exciting because with further improvement, the technology could potentially be used in the future to produce new crop varieties more quickly,” Professor Bernard Carroll from the university’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Bioscences said.
“With further research we could target an issue with a crop such as flavour or quality and have a new variety without the need for a decade of cross breeding or genetic modification.”
Carroll said the nanoparticle could increase the amount of food a crop produces, as well as improve its quality.
Agronomists and farmers already engage in this work through traditional plant breeding, but as Carroll pointed out, it was a long process, with up to 10 years to produce a new variety.
“Traditional plant breeding and genetic modification take many generations to produce a new crop variety, which is time-consuming and expensive,” he said.
“We have succeeded in having plant roots absorb a benign nanoparticle which was developed by Professor Gordon Xu’s group at UQ for the delivery of vaccines and cancer treatments in animals.”
Plant cell walls are “much tougher” than human or animal cells, so the nanoparticle was coated in a protein that helped gently loosen those cell walls, Carroll said.
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The nanoparticle then delivered an mRNA cargo into plants “for the first time”.
mRNAs are natural messenger molecules containing genetic instructions to build and enhance all forms of life.
“Similar to how an mRNA vaccine produces a protein to stimulate the immune system and then degrades away, the mRNA we deliver into plants is expressed transiently and then disappears,” Carroll said.
UQ’s commercialisation company UniQuest has patented the new technique, and is seeking partners to help further develop it.
