Development of new, superior strawberry varieties with economically important traits is critical to the Florida strawberry industry. UF/IFAS strawberry cultivars are bred through conventional methods. While effective, the process is resource intensive and challenging due to strawberry?s complicated genetics. Over the years many advanced breeding selections have been identified for various levels of disease resistance, flavor and fruit quality. However, it is almost impossible to take that near-perfect selection and reshuffle the genetics for all desirable traits.
Recent advances in targeted genome editing and cisgenesis biotechnologies provide a means to precisely correct one or few deficiencies, if the gene or genes responsible for generation of desirable traits. This advance technology is called CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) genome editing technology, and has been extensively applied in many economical important agronomic crops since its discovery. CRISPR can snip and tweak DNA to create precise mutations without leaving foreign DNA fragment inside plant genome, and thus strawberries engineered with CRISPR will be considered as NON-GMO. Recently, USDA has officially announced that it will not regulate CRISPR gene edited plants like it does GMOs, which make CRISPR technology valuable in accelerating strawberry breeding process. We anticipate that CRISPR genome editing can be used to bring strawberries to the growers and industry with improvements in disease resistance, fruit quality and other valuable attributes. Genome editing will also fuel research efforts in gene discovery and characterization, leading to future strawberry breeding.
