Non-Transgenic Trait Development in Crop Plants Using Oligo-Directed Mutagenesis: Cibus’ Rapid Trait Development System

the era of transgenic breeding or GMO technologies, the 21st century is silently turning to non-transgenic breeding or non-GMO technologies. Due to significant regulatory issues, cost of development and technology constraints, transgenic breeding technologies have been limited to a few crops grown on large acreages, i.e. about 10% of the available cultivated acres globally1. The promise of non-transgenic breeding technologies is their extraordinary breadth. Crops bred using these technologies can be planted on all farming acreage worldwide. And these technologies can address better, more novel non-transgenic traits both in largeand in small-acreage crops. Small crops are accessible because the development cost is so much less than for transgenic crops. This shift to non-transgenic technologies has been led by advances in precision geneediting technologies that include molecular scissors such as CRISPRs (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) and TALENs (transcription activator-like effector nucleases), bolstered by the explosion in genome-sequence information. Our understanding puts us at the threshold of a new era in non-transgenic crop breeding. With powerful Non-Transgenic Trait Development in Crop Plants Using Oligo-Directed Mutagenesis: Cibus’ Rapid Trait Development System