Cibus Announces Breakthrough in Wheat Regeneration From Single Cells

Agtech leader Cibus Inc. announced what is a major breakthrough for the global seed industry - the world’s first successful regeneration of a wheat plant from a single cell. 

Initially sequenced only five years ago, the wheat genome is one of the largest of all crops with more than 16 billion letters - five times larger than the human genome. They are also very complex with durum wheat comprising the combination of two genomes and bread wheat, the fusion of three. 

With the success of this achievement, Cibus stated it plans to develop a family of traits to address the greatest challenges being faced by the world’s wheat farmers starting with disease resistance and nitrogen use efficiency, and eventually develop a scalable high-speed breeding production system that can develop and produce traits for any seed company servicing any of the five major crops: canola, rice, wheat, soybeans, and corn.

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