David F. Savage

Stories

CRISPR enters the photosynthesis frontier, targeting the oldest bottleneck in food production

As of May 2026: Co-senior author of the Nature Biotechnology study

Plants have used the same photosynthesis machinery for hundreds of millions of years, converting just 1 to 2 percent of sunlight into energy. UC Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute has published a method using CRISPR edits to boost photosynthesis protein output by more than 30-fold without inserting foreign DNA.

Updated May 31