Stephen Long

Director, RIPE Project; Professor, University of Illinois

Appears in 1 story

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

As of May 2026: Leading competing/complementary effort to improve photosynthesis in food crops

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