Director, RIPE Project; Professor, University of Illinois
Appears in 1 story
Leading competing/complementary effort to improve photosynthesis in food crops
Plants have used the same basic photosynthesis machinery for hundreds of millions of years — and it has never been particularly efficient, converting just 1 to 2 percent of sunlight into usable energy. Now researchers at UC Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute have published a method to systematically identify CRISPR edits that boost the output of key photosynthesis proteins by more than 30-fold, without inserting any foreign DNA. The two companion papers, published in Nature Biotechnology on April 8, 2026, tested over 30,000 mutations across the regulatory regions of three photosynthesis genes in sorghum, creating what amounts to a precision tuning guide for crop genomes.
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