b"benefit agriculture. With funding from Genome Canada and the Canola Council of Canada, they began the process. Emes and Tetlow asked Liping Wang, research associate at the University of Guelph, to bring her high-level molecular genet-ics knowledge to the project. The scientists initially identified two genes in Arabidopsis to knock out, but then realized that in their specific canola cultivar, they needed to knock out six genes. Wang used a combination of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) to knock out those genes and traditional GM tech-niques to insert the corn genes. They saw significant improvement in the transgenic line com-pared to the control when the canola was grown.Silique num-bers increased from 200 to 300, the number of stems increased from five to 10, and they observed an average increase of 50% in seed weight. With all factors considered, they saw an overall yield increase of up to 50%.Another interesting observation in both Arabidopsis and canola was that the experimental plants stems were approxi-mately 50% thicker than the parent plants. The bonus is a significant yield increase and significant drought tolerance in the resulting plants.I was excited to see validation in terms of both yield and potential for drought resistance, Wang says. Right now, cli-mate change is a very urgent thing. I remember years ago in Saskatchewan, it was 33-34C in the summer, and canola doesnt like that heat. The yield significantly dropped.Wang explains that the goal is to provide both drought resist-ance and yield increase in canola.Wang did some experiments mimicking drought by increas-ing the temperature to 29C from the control of 22C as well as withholding water. The control lines suffered, and the CRISPR(Left to right) Michael Emes, Liping Wang and Ian Tetlow work edited lines also suffered, but not nearly as much.together at the University of Guelph creating transgenic canola The cultivar the researchers are using is already blacklegutilizing corn genetics. The resulting lines boast increased yields resistant, but not herbicide tolerant. and drought tolerance.PHOTO: UNIVERSITY OF GUELPHThis cultivar isn't herbicide tolerant. So that's something else that we need to engineer into this, which is not difficult, but addsWe have a very simplistic hypothesis as to why we think this another step, Emes says. is occurring, Tetlow says. Part of that is we think the plant is Emes says the team will also analyze the canola oil profile, butsensing it's got more carbon than it normally has at that point in as the Arabidopsis had no change to its profile with gene editing,its growth cycle. So understanding carbon reserve storage and they dont anticipate any changes in canola. sugar release, is I think, key to this.While the team is excited about the results theyve seen,At this point, experiments have been confined to controlled and they have obtained a U.S. patent for the process, theyregrowing environments. Temperature, humidity and light are all already looking toward other applications of this discovery.regulated. To be useful for agriculture, the crop needs to perform Understanding the why behind the results is key. well in real world conditions, so the next step is field trials. The If we can understand the mechanism that's occurring inteam plans to carry these out in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and canola and the Arabidopsis plant, we might be able to translateOntario, Canada and possibly in Montana.that to other crop systems as well, explained Tetlow. There areThis study is now part of the Agriscience Research Cluster for likely similarities in the mechanisms by which plants sense sugarCanola, funded by Canadian government. and how they how they respond to that at the physiologicalField trials will happen over the next three seasons, and well level.see how they do in an environment where we cant control eve-The researchers are working to understand this at the molec- rything, said Emes. ular and biochemical level, with an eye on the potential to repeatEmes expects it will take around 10 years before this line this process in other crops. could be commercially available.SWJANUARY 2024SEEDWORLD.COM /11"