What’s precision breeding?

Precision breeding transfers genetic material that can naturally crossbreed with a particular plant. This approach to genetic engineering only uses germplasm and genes which are already available to traditional plant breeders; hence the new novel plant derived is not transgenic, and is referred to as “intragenic” or “cisgenic”.

Using precision breeding tools, today we are able to silence, amplify or transfer those genes responsible for a particular characteristic into a new plant very precisely, in a single step.  The most common approach is to use interfering RNA (RNAi) technology, commonly used in the medical biotechnology field for gene therapy.

With the advent of an increasing amount of tree fruit genomics data, we are able to use the plant species’ own genes instead of using foreign-sourced genes.