Modern biotechnology for plant research and its application

The independent research group ‘Biotechnology and Genome Editing’ (BGE) is concerned with the development and establishment of the latest methodological approaches in plant biotechnology, both for basic and application-orientated research. 

The genetic diversity of crop plants is becoming increasingly better to visualise using modern sequencing methods. Biotechnology plays a key role in the functional analysis of different genes and their allelic variants. Well-established genome editing approaches such as targeted mutagenesis with Cas endonucleases from the bacterial CRISPR system make an important contribution here, but are still limited by a certain randomness of the resulting gene sequence. The independent research group BGE is therefore developing more precise and efficient methods of genome editing that allow gene variants to be reproduced exactly.  The aim is to make the genetic diversity of crop plants easier to research and to utilise for breeding purposes. 

The establishment of the group is based on funding from the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) as part of the research programme ‘Modern breeding research for climate- and location-adapted crops of tomorrow’.