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[Perspective] Genome editors take on crops

ScienceNOW - Fetched: March 16th, 2017, 4:00pm UTC

The global population is expected to rise from 7.3 billion to 9.7 billion by 2050 (1). At the same time, climate change poses increasing risks to crop production through droughts and pests (2). Improved crops are thus urgently needed to meet growing demand for food and address changing climatic conditions. Genome-editing technologies such as the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat)/Cas (CRISPR-associated protein) system (3) show promise for helping to address these challenges, if the precision of genome editing is improved and the technology is approved and accepted by regulators, producers, and consumers. Authors: Armin Scheben, David Edwards

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