PLANT BIOTECHNOLOGY –PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Plant Biotechnology Journal

By Johnathan Napier Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, UK. Editor in Chief.

It is a chastening fact that my university education started before the dawn of Plant Biotechnology, generally accepted as 1983, but I still recall the excitement of reading a paper in Nature from the Ghent group on making transgenic plants.1 This was the first in a wave of groundbreaking studies that demonstrated the feasibility of transferring foreign genes into plants and delivered a paradigm-shift in both research and development. The following decade saw rapid technological advances, and a collective realisation that plant genetic modification (soon to be universally known simply as GM) was already on a path to transforming agriculture (literally and metaphorically) and delivering societal benefits.

My own career journey included a PhD at Kings College, London, and a postdoc at Cambridge. I then went to the Institute for Arable Crops Research Long Ashton Research Station (part of University of Bristol) as a junior project leader, focused on engineering plant seeds. Under the benevolent guidance of my Director, Peter Shewry, a collaboration was established with Keith Stobart (University of Bristol) looking at the assembly of the electron transport chain for fatty acid desaturases. This work introduced me to the world of plant lipids and led to an industry-funded project in 1996 that aimed to clone genes involved in the synthesis of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). Thanks to the heroic efforts of my colleague Olga Sayanova, we discovered the first example of the b5 fusion front-end desaturases that are central to PUFA synthesis in all eukaryotes. Our studies paved the way for the next 25 years of work on metabolic engineering and attempts to generate GM plants accumulating non-native omega 3 PUFAs in their seed oils.

The late 1990s were a boom-time for Plant Biotechnology (herbicide-tolerant crops had just been commercialised and adopted by farmers, an amazing achievement given that the first transgenics were made only 15 years earlier!) and many companies were investing in research on GM traits; unfortunately, that trend did not persist, despite the obvious success of GM agriculture. In the last decade, much of my time and effort has been focused on carrying out field trials of our GM plants and trying to navigate a way through

SOCIETY FOR EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY PRESENTS: STARTED SETTING UP THE SEBIOLOGY.ORG #SEBCONFERENCE the complex regulatory landscapes that now seem synonymous with our sector.

So, from a research perspective, what’s different now? Probably the most striking change is the almost trivial availability of DNA sequences, either from databases or de novo. At the start of our project in 1996, only one eukaryotic genome was completed, and the sequence complexity of target organisms was effectively a black box. Gene discovery via whole genome sequencing is now a routine process, whereas in the past approaches such as degenerate PCR or hybridisation required a fair degree of both skill and luck. And, of course, the recent arrival of tools such as CRISPR to allow precise changes to genes in situ represents another level of technological capability.

It gives me an immense sense of pride to work in a field that addresses global challenges. As exemplified by the long-awaited arrival of Golden Rice2 and the more recent Big Purple Tomato,3 we are now witnessing the new dawn of Plant Biotechnology and GM crops. I think it has been worth the wait and truly delivers on the promise that was first apparent in 1983.