Precision BioSciences, Bayer CropScience announce successful cotton genome engineering project

Precision BioSciences, a leader in the field of genome engineering, recently announced that the Plant Biotechnology Journal has published an article describing the further work by Bayer CropScience Cell Biology Group Leader, Kathleen D'Halluin, and her colleagues following the milestone they achieved in 2011 when they reported on the successful insertion of a gene into a specific, desired location in cotton.

The groundbreaking work made successful use of Precision's DNE technology to precisely insert a two transgene cassette adjacent to an existing multi-transgene cassette in cotton.

An engineered DNE genome editing nuclease produced by Precision was used to insert two herbicide tolerance genes, epsps and hppd, into a cotton line that already carried the cry2Ae gene, an insect control trait, and the bar gene, an herbicide tolerance and selectable marker gene.

In doing so, scientists at Bayer CropScience were able to produce a trait stack in which four genes were expressed and are now located next to one another on the same chromosome.

Furthermore, D'Halluin's team demonstrated that the four gene stack was inherited as a single unit in the expected Mendelian manner. Precision's patent-protected technology has thus been shown to provide plant researchers with exquisite control over a plant genome.

"We are tremendously pleased with the results published by the peer reviewed Plant Biotechnology Journal," said Derek Jantz, Precision BioSciences' Vice President of Scientific Development and one of the study's authors. "This is a very satisfying demonstration of the power and versatility that our DNE technology brings to the industry for high value commercial applications."