My journey to Seville, where tomorrow’s sunflowers grow

Anyone who has ever stood beside a sunflower knows the quiet astonishment of being matched, petal for head, by a flower. Now imagine weaving your way through tens of thousands of stems at eye level, each one tethered to the transparent ceiling by a white cord, as if suspended between earth and sky. Overhead stretches a vision in perfect symmetry: thousands of threads rising in parallel, anchoring a forest of blossoms veiled like brides at the altar, their vivid yellow only just shimmering through the gauze. It could be a contemporary art installation, but this is the greenhouse of the world’s most advanced sunflower research center. We are not at the Venice Biennale nor at Documenta in Kassel, but just outside Seville, at the Centro Tecnológico de Investigación de La Rinconada.

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Plant editing gets easier with CRISPR loaded pollen

maisPollination is a natural way to deliver DNA into plant cells. So why not to use pollen as a vehicle for CRISPR machinery to start genome editing? HI Edit, as this approach is called, has been successfully tested by Syngenta in corn, Arabidopsis and wheat in the lab. Please see the paper just published in Nature Biotechnology by Timothy Kelliher et al., Jon Cohen’s piece in Science, and a quick guide to HI (haploid induction) from Current Biology. Leading wheat geneticist Cristobal Uauy of the John Innes Centre also showed high spirit, when asked for comment by email: “The possibility to genome edit any variety is revolutionary given that transformation is so difficult in many species. If I understand this correctly this would be a game changer as it would allow us to alter genes in elite cultivars.”