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Gene editing makes 'super chocolate'

Mail Online
Each year, 20 to 30 percent of the global production of cocoa pods, which are used to make chocolate, is destroyed by plant diseases.
Plant scientists from Penn State University believe they may have found a solution to the destruction the diseases cause.
Use of the powerful gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 could help to breed cacao trees that exhibit desirable traits such as enhanced resistance to diseases.
The cacao tree grows in tropical regions produces the cocoa beans that are the raw material of chocolate.
Reliable productivity from cacao plants is essential to the multibilliondollar chocolate industry, the economies of producing countries and the livelihoods of millions of smallholder cacao farmers.
"In West Africa, severe outbreaks of fungal diseases can destroy all cacao fruit on a single farm," said lead author Andrew Fister, postdoctoral scholar in plant science, College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State.
"Because diseases are a persistent problem for cacao, improving disease resistance has been a priority forresearch-ers. But development of disease-resistant varieties has been slowed by the need for sources of genetic resistance and the long generation time of cacao trees."
The researchers reported the study results in Frontiers in Plant Science,
which were thought to be the first to demonstrate the feasibility of using CRISPR technology to improve Theobroma cacao.
CRISPR stands for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats". It is a way to modify an organism's genome by precisely delivering a DNA-cutting enzyme, Cas9, to a targeted region of DNA.
The resulting change can delete or replace specific DNA pieces, thereby promoting or disabling certain traits.
Previous work in cacao identified a gene, known asTcNPR3, that suppresses
the plant's disease response.
The researchers hypothesised that using the technique to knock out this gene would result in enhanced disease resistance.
They tested it by adding CRISPR-Cas9 components into detached cacao leaves. They then infected the leaves with a naturally occurring plant pathogen, and the leaves showed graded resistance to the disease.