CRISPR-Cas9 genetically engineered plants will be on the table within the next 5 years

10/11/2015 - 16:55

Antonio Regalado


Agricultural biotech giants are starting to make moves into CRISPR gene editing, saying they’ll be selling seeds engineered with the technology by the end of this decade.

DuPont said today it entered an agreement with Caribou Biosciences, a spin-off from the laboratory of Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley, who carried out key work on CRISPR-Cas9, a technology that provides something like a find-and-replace feature for DNA.

DuPont says it is already growing corn and wheat plants edited with CRISPR in greenhouses and that field trials will start next spring.

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