Agriculture, from the outset, has been made possible by humans tweaking the genes of plants to make them grow faster, produce more of what we want, and survive drought, pests, and infection. For millennia, we did it with selective breeding. More recently, we advanced to genetic engineering. But even with today’s ultra-fast sequencing technologies and streamlined CRISPR-based gene editing tools, successfully altering a plant is a slow, laborious process.
‘Speed scanner’ can test thousands of plant gene switches at once
