Sowing the Seeds of Agricultural Biotechnology
Sowing the Seeds of Agricultural Biotechnology
According to Yield10 Bioscience, plant metabolism can be altered to enhance photosynthetic efficiency and carbon utilization, leading to better harvests
January 8, 2021
This image, which was captured by a drone, shows Yield10 Bioscience’s Field Test Program, which is designed to evaluate several novel traits in Camelina and canola.
Even as agricultural biotechnology (agbiotech) becomes more refined, it becomes more powerful. For example, relatively crude techniques such as transgenics are being supplanted by genome editing. Where transgenics blasts one organism’s genes into another organism’s genome, genome editing proceeds more delicately, altering a cell’s DNA directly. Genome editing can even be used to patiently reconfigure an organism’s metabolic networks, systematically improving crop quality while boosting yields.