Winetech Technical Yearbook 2022

JULY

KATARINA SPENSER

WINETECH TECHNICAL YEARBOOK 2022 THIS REVIEW WILL FOCUS ON ONE PROMISING INNOVATION IN BREEDING TECHNOLOGY, NAMELY GENOME EDITING. BY MANUELA CAMPA, PHILIP YOUNG, MELANE VIVIER & JOHAN BURGER A AGRICULTURE IS CRITICAL in addressing some of the world’s major challenges: food shortage, nutrition, health and sustainabil ity. Most of the advances in agriculture in the last century can be attributed to either mechanisation (industrial revolution) or improved management and plant breeding and selection (green revolution). Further improvement in productivity and sustain ability will, however, require continued advances and innovation. WHAT IS GENE EDITING? Genome editing is a catchall phrase to de scribe the technologies that are available to alter an organism’s DNA. The most promising of these technologies is CRIS PR, which is an acronym for ‘Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats’ and occurs in nature as a bacte rial ‘immune system’. The technology is relatively simple and versatile, hence its success in revolutionising science, from medicine to agriculture. A decade ago, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Char pentier unveiled the potential of this tech nology and since then the progress and applications increased exponentially. This discovery is having such an impact on our lives that the two scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020. Much like antibodies in our own im mune system, the CRISPR system enables the bacteria to identify an infecting virus and target specific sequences for destruc tion using specialised proteins. These proteins are called CRISPR-associated proteins (Cas). 29 The CRISPR revolution and grapevine