"Domestication from the beginning": Create personalized new foods.

Originally title: "Domestication from the beginning": Creating personalized new
is the food we eat perfect? Is the need for healthy nutrition met? Yan Jianbing, a professor at the National Key Laboratory for Crop Genetic Improvement at Huazhong Agricultural University, has no answer to these questions.
future food production targets should be based on people's individual needs to feed food," he said. A series of recent achievements by Yan Jianbing's team suggest that improving or "designing" some new crops on the basis of food security will be more in line with the transformation and development of agriculture in the future.
"reassemble" new crops to produce perfect, personalized food? Yan Jianbing proposed solutions for "re-domestication" of semi-domesticated crops and "domestication from the beginning" to produce new crops.
most of the crops now eaten by humans were domesticated from the ancestors of wild plants over a long period of 12,000 years. Of the more than 400,000 plants that exist, fewer than 100 are domesticated into crops that can be cultivated today. And 70 percent of the energy that humans get from food comes from only 15 crops, of which corn, rice and wheat account for 50 percent.
and future agricultural production faces many challenges, such as environmental pollution, water scarcity, extreme climate change, micronutrient deficiencies and inefficient crop production. Yan Jianbing believes that fundamentally changing the food production model, considering crop design from the demand side, adopting a controlled industrial production model, or helping to solve these problems and challenges.
In fact, breakthroughs in gene editing and big data technology, using the knowledge accumulated by a large number of known pattern plants and major crops in the process of domestication and improvement, are opening the door to human "design breeding". Moreover, knowledge-driven "domestication from the beginning" may take only a few years.
"We can re-domesticate some new crops from a large number of wild and semi-wild plants that are more in line with the future needs of mankind, while providing new solutions to the growing world food problem." Yan Jianbing said, "Like building blocks, what you want to be assembled into, such as providing diabetics with low sugar conversion rate of food." The advantage of 're-domestication' is that semi-domesticated species that have adapted to the planting environment can be directly utilized. 'Domestication from the beginning' can be achieved through techniques such as traditional artificial selection and genome editing. "Setting up a "production line" to identify corn's functional genes also means that finding wild or semi-wild plants suitable for "editing" is the most critical step. At the same time, the excavation and analysis of key functional genes affecting the dominant nature of crops is also considered to be an important subject for the realization of crop "re-domestication" and "domestication from the beginning".
Yan Jianbing put forward the key steps to realize the "domestication from the beginning" of the new crop: the identification of key genes, the rapid realization of the transformation of wild plants to domesticated crops, the use of gene editing and other technologies to achieve the precise regulation of the target gene network, the provision of personalized crops with different beneficial features to meet the diverse needs of different groups of people. The dream of "domestication from scratch" begins with the genetic analysis of the complex quantitative nature of corn. Global maize seeding area, unit yield and total yield have exceeded rice and wheat, so genetic improvement of maize production is essential to ensure food security in the world and in China.
improved domestication of crops tells us that corn requires only five to six key genetic changes, from wild weeds to cultivated crops. The continuous improvement of agronomy and quality character, such as yield, is only about 1200 gene changes, accounting for about 3% of the total genome.
" excavation of genes that control the importance of the gene is the premise and theoretical basis of crop genetic improvement. Zhang Zuxin, a professor at the National Key Laboratory for Crop Genetic Improvement at Huahua Agricultural University, told China Science that corn genome sequencing has been completed and continuously improved since 2009. Their team recently confirmed KNR6, a gene that encodes serine/suline protein kinases, which controls corn yield by affecting the number of flowers, spike length, and line grains in female spikes. "However, the large and complex corn genome, the limited range of stable transformation, the targeting and specificity is not high, the conversion efficiency is low, is also an important problem restricting the study of the functional genes of corn production." Zhang Zuxin said.
you want to do good, you must first take the necessary necessary. This "sharp weapon" is CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and big data technology. In recent years, the application of CRISPR/Cas9 systems has helped rice and soybeans to create large-scale mutant resources. "But these large-scale gene editing studies focus on CRISPR/Cas9 as an alternative to traditional mutation methods, and there is still no in-depth study on how to improve the high-volume system of the whole process from target design to mutation sequence detection for plant characteristics, and how to reduce the cost of mining the laws of genome impact after the application of this emerging technology." Yan Jianbing said.
, he put forward the idea of integrating traditional genetic positioning and high-volume targeted gene editing to speed up the mining of corn functional genes. This idea is equivalent to the identification of corn functional genome research set up an efficient "production line", from the traditional first "one in a million" out of the functional gene and then its analysis of the crop genetic improvement method, changed to directly analyze hundreds of functional genes, greatly improving the identification efficiency and probability of success, but also reduce costs. "Based on knowledge-driven and emerging technology tools, crops are first well designed and planned rather than blindly selected, and crop genetic re-identification and even repositioning are possible to 'domesticate' crops from the beginning." Yan Jianbing said.
Zhang Zuxin also said that traditional breeding and modern breeding techniques are interdependent and cannot be separated. Traditional breeding can reflect its value and superiority only by combining organically with traditional breeding and applying it reasonably to all aspects of breeding. Innovative design genetic groups to achieve the idea, in addition to effective "sharp" and efficient "production line", to find a suitable "production object" (breeding materials) is also very important.
15 years, Yan Jianbing's team and partners have innovatively designed a genetic group, the CUBIC group (the multi-parent high-generation self-confessed group). This group comes from 24 corn backbone self-intersecting systems of four hybrid advantage groups in China, the researchers realized all parent gene exchange through two rounds of double-column hybridization, greatly shortened the group development cycle, and then adopted 6 generations of open pollination and 6 generations of continuous self-intercourse, and finally obtained 1404 self-interbreeding families as excellent breeding materials, which can be used for follow-up research.
Jianbing, a researcher at the University of China, said the CUBIC group combines the experience of breeders with the genetic design of basic researchers, who have made genetic breeding an important goal since the beginning of their design. Compared with the traditional genetic group, CUBIC design has many advantages, such as high genetic diversity, not obvious group structure, fuller recombination events and closer to breeding objectives, which ensure that the group has higher positioning efficacy and is expected to produce results that can be directly applied to breeding practice.
recently, researchers used the CUBIC population to identify more than 600 key candidates and other important candidate genes, and conducted large-scale experiments on more than 1,000 candidate genes. The researchers believe that by investigating the esoteric forms of all genetic mutants in the critical genotype range, functional genes can be identified, omitting the cumbersome process of fine positioning. "In layman's terms, we've reduced the amount of a 'reservoir' gene to a 'pond'. So the next step is to find the key genes from the pond, which will be even more challenging. Yan Jianbing said.
, Yan Jianbing believes that "the fire of firewood is high." The CUBIC community has been open to "resource sharing, crowdfunding research" to promote customized genetic modification of maize and to promote the realization of the dream of personalized crop "domestication from the beginning" research.
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