NAPIGEN INC — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase I: 8.199999999999999

Description

Food security is one of the foremost challenges that we face in the present world.We intend toprovide one of the disruptive & achievable solutions: Elite hybrid wheat.Hybrid corn has beenthe foundation of gaining more than eight-fold yields over 90 years since its introduction inUSA. We aim to re-create the successful agricultural history with wheat.Hybrid wheat plantscan create 15% more yield with the current germplasm translating into 112 million tons moregrains and US $23 billion p.a. worldwide.The yield gain is expected to further increase throughthe future breeding of new germplasm optimized for heterotic effects.Despite the promise the introduction of hybrid wheat has been hindered by the lack of optimalelite male-sterile lines which serve as female plants pollinated by male pollen donors.Weaddress the problem and intend to develop a new strategy of creating robust cytoplasmic malesterile lines in elite backgrounds.We plan to edit the wheat mitochondrial genome to introducecytoplasmic 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 aregenerally accepted by the public and US governments as safe products.Safety is especiallyimportant for wheat as it is largely consumed by humans.Toward the creation of hybrid wheat with our technologies the current critical technical step isto enable mitochondrial transformation in wheat. We plan to accomplish it in this proposedproject by combining existing approaches and new strategies that we developed based on theunique genetic features of wheat mitochondria.