PFI-TT: Accelerated Detection of Successful Crop Production

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project is the acceleration of modern crop production by removing a key roadblock. Currently, the time and monetary investment required to generate a new crop line produces accessibility inequities to the latest improved strains. Through this project, a technology will be developed to reduce the time and cost to the commercial production pipeline. This technology will help understand the earliest steps of the crop production pipeline on the molecular level, so that projects and lines that are destined to fail can be quickly identified and removed from the production line. This early quality control will reduce the time and investment associated with the crop production pipeline, reducing the commercial investment in the process and improving accessibility to potential new crops. The proposed project aims to detect off-type or “aberrant” RNAs in new crop lines in the early event sorting phase, after the process of transgenesis. These aberrant RNAs are unwanted, as they fail the cell’s RNA quality control mechanism and inhibit future transcription from these regions. The overall scientific goals of this project are to develop a technology that detects all the RNA generated by a plant transgene or any locus of interest, and then use this predictive information to inform breeders which lines should progress in the crop production pipeline. The research objectives are to refine the technology to identify all species of RNA generated by a transgene, and then test this predive potential on real-world crop lines provided by an industry partner.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.