In planta jet injection: Efficient genetic engineering of resilient crops

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Feeding 11 billion people by 2100 in a changing climate is a global challenge. Without further innovation, predicted crop yield will decrease due to climate change effects. Moreover, the number of biotic threats is increasing with pathogen pressure and infection risk showing temperature-dependency as well. Thus, crop breeding must be invigorated to generate plants with higher yield, and climate change resilience needs to be urgently met. Genome editing has the potential to assist classical breeding. Breeding based on gene editing enables faster production of crops with improved traits such as drought tolerance, disease resistance, and increased yield. Established delivery methods for in planta crop transformation are labor-intensive, cannot be applied to any crop species and have low transformation efficiencies, often below 1%. Delivering genome-editing cargo efficiently and cost-competitive in vivo, through the hard plant cell wall, is an unmet challenge. With our approach we aim to generate affordable, high-throughput devices that enable fast and efficient transformation of crops. Thus, our scalable approach is compatible with mass production. This, in turn, will open the market for transgenic plants for newcomers leading to more innovation and competition that will drive food costs for the consumers and varied products.