The Climate Biotech Podcast
Plant Genome Editing for Sustainable Agriculture with Evan Groover
On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, Paul Reginato is joined by Evan Groover, a plant synthetic biologist and postdoctoral fellow in Mary Gehring's lab at the Whitehead Institute at MIT. His work spans CRISPR tool development, engineering photosynthesis, plant epigenetics, and making plant genome editing accessible beyond the well-funded incumbents that have historically dominated the field. Evan grew up in Northern California in what he calls the epicenter of the non-GMO movement, and studied music seriously before finding his way to plant biology. He came into the field just as regulators began distinguishing gene-edited plants from transgenic ones, a shift that opened modern editing tools to a much wider set of crops and researchers. During his PhD at UC Berkeley at the Innovative Genomics Institute, Evan built a screening system in sorghum protoplasts capable of testing roughly 30,000 CRISPR edits at once, targeting the promoters of three photosynthesis genes to find the smallest possible edits that could increase their expression – a process that would take months or years and many acres of land to perform in the field. One of Evan's core points is that flowering plants – which account for nearly all crops – share most of their genes, and much of what distinguishes one species or variety from another sits in the regulatory DNA sequences that control when and where those genes are expressed. That has implications for how we improve crops. Traditional breeding selects variation that already exists in crops, but genome editing can introduce small but novel changes in regulatory sequences that access phenotypic space that no living plant currently occupies. In his current postdoc, Evan is extending this thinking into epigenetics, asking how much crop performance is shaped by chemical modifications to DNA that exist outside of the sequence itself. Listen to learn how genome editing can be a powerful tool for agriculture with regulatory acceptance, and why improving photosynthesis is a promising lever for sustainable agriculture and potentially carbon removal. Send us Fan Mail
