News & Comment

The proposal by the European Commission for new rules on gene-edited plants aims to align legislation with new developments in biotechnology. Yet concerns remain that have to do not only with biology.

A plethora of methods is available to study plants, from the humble northern or western blots to recent high-throughput single-cell and spatial transcriptomics. But seeing is believing, and researchers worldwide have always had a weakness for specific genetically encoded biosensors that can isolate and visualize one precise response in living plants at cellular resolution.

Model organisms are powerful research tools for exploring fundamental biological questions, but no one model can encompass the full diversity of plant life.

The ‘listicle’ has been a staple of internet content since the earliest days of the world wide web. But a recent example in New Phytologist has rather more significance than ‘The top 50 theremin players of all time’.

Genome editing provides a unique opportunity to create produce benefiting consumers, but success depends on risk-proportional regulation. Existing seedless fruit varieties such as watermelon, mandarin oranges and grape are strongly preferred by consumers and support healthy diets without pre-market regulatory approvals required for commercialization. Replicating the seedless trait in other fruits is a promising way to increase consumption. Here we compare the differential treatment by various regulatory systems of identical products made by inserting an ancient seedless allele into muscadine grape (Vitis rotundifolia) using traditional breeding or templated or non-templated genome editing tools.

This month’s Nature Plants is issue 100. A lot has happened in the hundred months since issue 1, and yet much that concerned us then continues to concern us now.