Two researchers at the University of California, Davis, have been awarded a VinFuture Prize in recognition of their work developing self-cloning crops, a breakthrough for sustainable agriculture. 

Venkatesan Sundaresan, a Distinguished Professor of plant biology and plant sciences, and Imtiyaz Khanday, an assistant professor of plant sciences, travelled to Hanoi, Vietnam to receive the prize at a special VinFuture Foundation ceremony Dec. 5.

The $500,000 VinFuture Special Prize for Innovators with Outstanding Achievements in Emerging Fields was created in 2021 to honor emerging research fields and innovations that have the potential to create positive changes for humanity. 

“I’m honored that the global impact of our research is being recognized in this way,” said Khanday. “I come from a farming family, and I’ve always wanted to develop technologies that help farmers, especially smallholder farmers. We’re trying to make better seeds for the world.”

Cloning for sustainability 

As the world’s climate warms and the human population increases, creating sustainable agricultural systems is an urgent priority. One way to immediately increase yield is to sow hybrid crops, the offspring of two genetically different varieties, which can produce up to 50% more grain than their parents. But when those hybrids reproduce, their offsprings’ yield is unpredictable, which means that farmers who want the sustained benefits of hybrids must purchase new seed each year. 

Sundaresan and Khanday’s work created hybrid crops that bypass sexual reproduction by cloning themselves, which means that their high yields can be maintained for generations.

“Making crop hybrids widely available to smallholder farmers can meet food demands for the 21^st century sustainably, without increasing land use or agricultural inputs,” said Sundaresan. “It will have vast impacts on millions of rice farmers and billions of people in developing countries for whom rice is the major caloric source.”   

Producing self-cloning plants requires two key steps. First, the researchers used CRISPR/Cas-9 methods to switch off genes related to meiosis, which ensures that the plant’s egg cells have a full set of chromosomes. Then, they activated a gene called BBM1 which triggers the egg cells to develop into embryos without the need for fertilization. 

This method mimics a process called apomixis that occurs naturally in hundreds of plant species, including blackberries and oranges. The resulting embryos have identical genetic makeup as their parents and, because their offspring also reproduce clonally, farmers can save their seeds to plant in subsequent years.

The global impact of basic research

The team’s prize-winning innovation emerged from basic research supported by federal grants, highlighting how scientific discoveries — and the impactful applications they enable — are often serendipitous.

“When we started out, we weren't even working on this problem,” said Sundaresan. “We were just trying to understand how plants make embryos.”

Khanday discovered BBM1’s role in triggering embryo activation while working as a postdoctoral fellow in Sundaresan’s lab. At around the same time, Raphael Mercier from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany and Emmanuel Guiderdoni and Delphine Mieulet from CIRAD (French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development) in Montpellier, France, figured out a way to prevent meiosis in rice. When the two groups joined forces, synthetic apomixis was born.

The team unveiled their self-cloning technique in rice in 2018. Since then, they discovered another gene that increases the success rate to around 90%. They have also demonstrated that synthetic apomixis is possible in maize and an independent research group recently used their method to induce apomixis in sorghum. 

An emerging field with global impact

Sundaresan and Khanday are working to further expand the potential of self-cloning hybrids. While Sundaresan is pursuing ways to optimize the technology in rice and other cereal crops, Khanday is working to develop self-cloning vegetable crops, starting with potatoes and tomatoes.

“You can preserve any desirable genotype with this technology, whether that’s disease resistance or climate tolerance,” said Khanday. “Synthetic apomixis has the potential to impact agriculture globally, especially for smallholder farmers.”

Sundaresan and Khanday share the prize with Mercier, Guiderdoni and Mieulet. The team joins an illustrious group of awardees: Previous winners of the prize include the inventors of CAR-T cancer immunotherapy; the Nobel Prize-winning developers of AlphaFold; and the researchers who discovered the GLP-1 pathway, which enabled the invention of Ozempic and related weight-loss drugs. 

“We are poised on what I hope will be a new revolution in agriculture,” said Sundaresan. “Our invention means that the benefits of hybrid crops will become available, equitable and accessible to farmers all over the world. This is hugely important for achieving sustainable food production.”

Sundaresan and Khanday’s work was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Experiment Station, the Innovative Genomics Institute and the France-Berkeley Fund.