 Genetic technologies can be used to improve the nutrient value in easy-to-grow crops, where food supplies are limited in developing nations. At the John Innis Centre in Norwich, Dr. Philip Aborell leads a group that focuses on understanding the wheat genome in order to improve the nutritional value of wheat grain. Although wheat is mainly considered to be a source of calories, it also provides protein and micronutrients in the human diet. However, the levels of key micronutrients such as iron and zinc in wheat are low. The world's population is increasing rapidly, which means we need to dramatically increase the production of food. In many parts of the world, wheat provides the major source of diet for people, but one of the limitations of wheat currently is it's quite low in nutritional value, so we don't see very much iron content or zinc content, but also protein content. That means in the developing world where people depend largely on eating wheat, they might be deficient in some of these essential nutrients. Iron and zinc are critical nutrients for human health, they're an essential part of our diet, and in our research we're trying to improve the nutrient content of wheat so that not only do they receive calories by eating this crop, but they also receive improved nutritional content. The process of crop improvement is where gene editing comes in. With conventional breeding, it takes a very long time to produce a new wheat variety. For example, if today I identified a specific trait that was beneficial, say higher nutrient content, and started crossing that in to make a new wheat variety, it would take 10 to 15 years before that variety would be ready for farmers to grow in their fields. With new techniques where we can specifically focus on individual genes, we can accelerate the process to make it quicker. We can now use gene editing to precisely change the DNA sequence in many different organisms, including wheat. Gene editing allows us to rapidly make changes that could be made through conventional breeding, but we can specifically choose which part of the DNA sequence we want to alter, and therefore induce a beneficial change in our plant species. We're now trying to identify genes that could be useful to increase the content of nutrients like iron and zinc, but at the moment in wheat we have quite a little understanding of which genes would be involved in transporting nutrients from the leafy tissues into the developing grain. So we want to understand which genes are involved in this nutrient transport, and then also what are the rate limiting steps in this process so that we can try to speed up those steps to improve the final amount of iron and zinc in the grain. A special feature of many plants is that they have a polyploid genome. This means that during their evolution their whole genome has doubled, resulting in them having multiple copies of each gene. Wheat has undergone two duplications, meaning that it has three copies of most genes. This is really a challenge for crop breeding, because in wheat to see the maximum benefit, we need to think about all three copies of the gene and try to improve all three copies. The gene-edited plants start life in a well-lit cupboard. So in this cabinet we have different stages of gene-edited plants. So first of all the transformed plants grow on small petri dishes, and then eventually they generate new leaves, and at that point they can transfer individual new plants into separate pots. Some of the wheat plants are then transferred out to the greenhouse. So here we have some plants that we've been tagging as they develop. So we add a little tag with the date at which they flower, and then we can look at the grains as they develop on the ear, and then at different time points harvest the grains and measure how active the different genes are. This allows us to identify nutrient transport genes that will be most active at specific time points and understand the whole process of nutrient import. The team also tests many of their gene-edited plants outside. We're now at the John and Ness Field Station where we grow our wheat plants to test if they're able to grow well in field conditions. Here we can see one meter squared plots of different wheat lines or varieties that have different characteristics. These plants are at a stage before flowering. Once they flower that means that the grains can then start to develop. Once the grains have fully developed the plants will dry down, they'll turn golden. At that point we'll harvest the grains, grind them up, and measure protein, zinc, and iron content to see whether our gene of interest does affect the nutrient content in the grains. What skills do you need for a career in plant gene editing? We need to analyse the data. So data analysis is really critical to understand our results and interpret them in light of the existing knowledge. When I'm looking for someone to come and work with me, I search for someone with good problem-solving skills who's curious about the world around them and will be curious about the experiments that they're doing, good skills at observing what's happening, but also excellent communication skills. We work in a team. These days science is rarely done by a single person locked away in their lab. Instead we work in a large team with people from all different backgrounds. So being able to communicate and share your results and discuss and interpret them with a wide range of people is really important. What areas of study will be useful to get into this field? It will be important to study science, so particularly biology but also other sciences like chemistry or physics could also help. Having a good understanding of maths is important as well, so that would be an important subject to study too. Going forwards at A-level, again specialising in the sciences would be helpful and then thinking about university, studying at a biology degree was the way that I came into this career, but there are many of my colleagues who've come through different routes, for example studying computer science and they have a more specialised role in carrying out computer modelling rather than doing experiments in the greenhouse. I think that crop research is in really an exponential growth phase, so until recently it was really difficult to apply new techniques like gene editing or understand the genomes of crops, but now we have the resources and methods we need to start understanding fundamental biology in these crop species and this is a really exciting time to ask biological questions in highly relevant crops like wheat. Why is gene editing technology particularly necessary in plants such as wheat? With gene editing then we target individual genes to make improvements in crop species and particularly in wheat where we have three copies of each gene and using conventional breeding is very difficult to affect all three copies and really cause a strong effect in a particular characteristic of the plant, but using gene editing we can now target all three copies simultaneously to save time and be able to make bigger changes in the plant's characteristics. Are there any particular problems that we face now that this technology may solve? With climate change we're seeing increasingly unpredictable weather and this includes many areas where we grow our staple crops like wheat. For example in South Asia there have been increasing problems with flooding and we know some genes that affect flooding tolerance in other crop species and we can use that knowledge to make specific edits within wheat to try to improve the flooding tolerance which would make varieties that would be suitable under these changing climactic conditions. So I suppose it could also reduce the use of pesticides for example? Yeah definitely so there are still areas where we're working on our biological understanding because really to reap the benefits of gene editing we need to know which gene should we target and that's still a challenge in crops like wheat which have three times as many genes as in the human genome, but we can now start to build on our existing knowledge and use new technologies like genomics to really make the most of gene editing. And are there any other crops beyond wheat that this technology is applicable to? Yeah so gene editing is being applied to a huge range of different crop species so almost name a crop and someone will be trying it out whether it works or not yet then it's still quite a young technology and we're working on how to improve it to put it into multiple different crop species. Thank you very much Philippa. Thank you.