Molecular method promises to speed development of food crops

• News & Highlights

The first human farmers needed hundreds of years and a lot of good luck to shape the first domesticated crops. Modern plant breeders wait weeks or months, not centuries, to discover what the literal fruits of their labors might be; now, a study led at Illinois and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has explored the strengths of a molecular method that reduces this wait time to a few days.

The new study, published in Plant, Cell and Environment, addresses a central challenge of transgenic plant development: how to reliably evaluate whether genetic material has been successfully introduced. Researchers at the University of Illinois, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of California, Berkeley compared the traditional method to several new ones that have emerged from advances in genomic technology and identified one that is much faster than the standard approach, yet equally reliable. The study was led by Illinois postdoctoral fellows Kasia Glowacka and Johannes Kromdijk.