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Engineering good viruses to improve crop performance

Nature Reviews Bioengineering (2024)Cite this article

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Viruses can be engineered to deliver nucleic acids, peptides and proteins for plant trait reprogramming. Building on market approvals and sales of recombinant virus-based biopharmaceuticals for veterinary and human medicine, similar innovations may be applied to agriculture for transient or heritable biodesign of crops with improved performance and sustainable production.

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Fig. 1: Engineering viruses for crop biodesign and agriculture.

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Acknowledgements

F.P. is supported by a ‘Juan de la Cierva Incorporación’ contract (IJC2019-039970-I) from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain), and M.U. by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01-101110621) from the European Commission. F.P. gratefully acknowledges grants MiniVi (ELIXIR-IIB, Cineca, Italy) and BCV-2023-1-0021 (Red Española de Supercomputación, Spain), and resources provided by Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia (CESGA, Spain). C.-T.K. is supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT), Republic of Korea (2022R1C1C1002941).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Plantas (IBMCP), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas – Universitat Politècnica de València (CSIC-UPV), Valencia, Spain

    Fabio Pasin

  2. Laboratory for Plant Genetics and Crop Improvement, Division of Crop Biotechnics, Department of Biosystems, KU Leuven, Heverlee, Belgium

    Mireia Uranga

  3. KU Leuven Plant Institute (LPI), KU Leuven, Heverlee, Belgium

    Mireia Uranga

  4. Plant Pathology Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Raghavan Charudattan

  5. BioProdex, Inc., Gainesville, FL, USA

    Raghavan Charudattan

  6. Graduate School of Green-Bio Science, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Republic of Korea

    Choon-Tak Kwon

  7. Department of Smart Farm Science, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Republic of Korea

    Choon-Tak Kwon

Authors
  1. Fabio Pasin
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  2. Mireia Uranga
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  3. Raghavan Charudattan
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  4. Choon-Tak Kwon
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Contributions

F.P. conceived the work and drafted the manuscript; M.U., R.C. and C.-T.K. collaborated on the manuscript preparation. All authors revised and approved the final version.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fabio Pasin.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Related links

European Commission EU Pesticides Database: https://food.ec.europa.eu/plants/pesticides/eu-pesticides-database_en

Gene Therapy Clinal Trials Worldwide database: https://a873679.fmphost.com/fmi/webd/GTCT

US Environmental Protection Agency Pesticide Chemical Search: https://ordspub.epa.gov/ords/pesticides/f?p=CHEMICALSEARCH:1:

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Pasin, F., Uranga, M., Charudattan, R. et al. Engineering good viruses to improve crop performance. Nat Rev Bioeng (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44222-024-00197-y

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