From the journal Science, July 29:
This story, the first in a series on CRISPR in China, was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
IN BEIJING AND DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA—If Gao Caixia
were a farmer, she might be spread a little thin. Down the hall from her
office at a branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) here in
Beijing, seeds from a strain of unusually soft rice and a variety of
wheat with especially fat grains and resistance to a common fungus
sprout in a tissue culture room. A short stroll away, wild tomato plants
far hardier than domestic varieties but bearing the same sweet fruit
crowd a greenhouse, along with herbicide-resistant corn and potatoes
that are slow to brown when cut. In other lab rooms Gao grows new
varieties of lettuce, bananas, ryegrass, and strawberries.
But Gao isn’t a farmer, and that
cornucopia isn’t meant for the table—not yet, anyway. She is a plant
scientist working at the leading edge of crop improvement. Every one of
those diverse crops has been a target for conventional plant breeders,
who have slowly and painstakingly worked to endow them with traits to
make them more productive, nutritious, or hardy. But Gao is improving
them at startling speeds by using the genome editor CRISPR.
Gao is one face of the Chinese government’s bet that CRISPR can
transform the country’s food supply. A natural bacterial immune system,
CRISPR was turned into a powerful genome editor just a few years ago in
U.S. and European labs. Yet today, China publishes twice as many
CRISPR-related agricultural papers as the second-place country, the
United States. The explanation? “Because I’m here,” jokes Gao, who
punctuates much of her speech with robust, giddy, infectious laughter.
In August 2013, her group modified plant DNA with CRISPR, a first,
and the 50-year-old researcher has since written three dozen
publications that describe using the genome editor on various crops.
Daniel Voytas, a plant geneticist at the University of Minnesota in St.
Paul who invented an earlier genome-editing system and who has also
adopted CRISPR, says Gao is an “outstanding cell biologist [who] jumped
on CRISPR early on and has just been riding the crest of the wave.”
But she is far from alone in China. Her team is one of 20 groups
there seeking to use CRISPR to modify crop genes. “All the labs use
CRISPR for basic research,” Gao says. “They cannot live without CRISPR.”
China also expanded its efforts beyond its borders in 2017, when the
state-owned company ChemChina bought Switzerland-based Syngenta—one of
the world’s four largest agribusinesses, which has a large R&D team
working with CRISPR—for $43 billion. That was the most China has ever
spent on acquiring a foreign company, and it created an intimate
relationship between government, industry, and academia—a “sort of a
ménage à trois” that ultimately could funnel intellectual property from
university labs into the company, says plant geneticist Zachary Lippman
of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.
Chinese leaders “want to strategically invest in genome editing, and
[by that] I mean, catch up,” says Zhang Bei, who heads a team of 50
scientists at the Syngenta Beijing Innovation Center and works closely
with a sister R&D facility in Durham. “And they also want to be the
global leader as well in this area.”...
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