SBIR-STTR Award

Food security is one of the foremost challenges that we face in the present world. We intend to provide one of the disruptive & achievable solutions: Elite hybrid wheat. Hybrid corn has been the foundation of gaining more than eight-fold yields over 90 years since its introduction in USA. We aim to re-create the successful agricultural history with wheat. Hybrid wheat plants can create 15% more yield with the current germ plasm translating into 112 million tons more grains and US $23 billion p.a. worldwide. The yield gain is expected to further increase through the future breeding of new germplasm optimized for heterotic effects. Despite the promise the introduction of hybrid wheat has been hindered by the lack of optimal elite male-sterile lines which serve as female plants pollinated by male pollen donors. We address the problem and intend to develop a new strategy of creating robust cytoplasmic male sterile lines in elite backgrounds. We plan to edit the wheat mitochondrial genome to introduce cytoplasmic male sterility mutations by applying our unique mitochondrial CRISPR technology. Subsequently we edit the nuclear genome to introduce restoration genes so that F hybrid plants1 become fertile to set seeds. Crop plants produced by such genome editing technologies are generally accepted by the public and US governments as safe products. Safety is especially important for wheat as it is largely consumed by humans. Toward the creation of hybrid wheat with our technologies the current critical technical step is to enable mitochondrial transformation in wheat. We plan to accomplish it in this proposed project by combining existing approaches and new strategies that we developed based on the unique genetic features of wheat mitochondria.