Why This Matters:
- Accelerates Crop Innovation: Cuts months off the process of developing gene-edited crops, speeding up the path from gene discovery to field-ready varieties.
- Expands Accessibility: Reduces reliance on specialized tissue culture labs, making advanced bioengineering feasible for more research institutions and crop species.
- Boosts Global Food Security: Has the potential to enable faster breeding of crops with better resilience, nutrient efficiency and disease resistance.
A team of plant biotechnologists led by Gunvant Patil at Texas Tech University has developed a groundbreaking method that could dramatically speed up the development of regeneration process and gene-edited crops.
The method would allow scientists to bypass one of the most time-consuming and technically challenging steps in plant biotechnology – tissue culture.
The study, published this week in Molecular Plant , introduces a synthetic regeneration system that enables plants to grow new shoots directly from wounded tissue, eliminating the need for traditional lab-based regeneration steps that often take months and limit which crops can be bioengineered. This work was primarily carried out by graduate student Arjun Ojha Kshetry in Texas Tech's Institute of Genomics for Crop Abiotic Stress Tolerance (IGCAST).
"Plant regeneration has always been the bottleneck in biotechnology," said Patil, lead senior author and associate professor in IGCAST. "Our approach unlocks the plant's own natural ability to regrow after injury, allowing us to directly induce new, gene-edited shoots without spending months in tissue culture. This could fundamentally change how we develop improved crops."
In most genetic engineering methods, researchers must regenerate a whole plant from a single cell using precise nutrient and hormone combinations, a slow, expensive and often genotype-dependent process. Patil's team instead engineered a simple system that reactivates the plant's own wound-healing and regeneration pathways.
By combining two powerful genes – WIND1, which triggers cells near a wound to reprogram themselves, and the isopentenyl transferase (IPT) gene, which produces natural plant hormones promoting new shoot growth – the team created a self-contained regeneration cascade. This system successfully generated gene-edited shoots in multiple crops, including tobacco, tomatoes and soybeans.
"This system works like turning on a hidden switch in the plant," Patil said. "When we activate the wound-response genes, the plant essentially starts rebuilding itself, this time carrying the desired genetic changes."
The new technique also integrates with Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-based genome editing tools, enabling precise gene modifications in a single step. The ability to generate transgenic, or gene-edited, plants directly on the parent plant could make crop improvement faster, cheaper and accessible to a wider range of species.
"This is a significant step toward democratizing plant biotechnology," said Luis Herrera-Estrella , a co-author, director of IGCAST and the President's Distinguished Professor of Plant Genomics at Texas Tech. "By reducing dependence on tissue culture and specialized lab facilities, this system could make genetic innovation possible for many more crops and research programs worldwide."
The study demonstrates higher regeneration success rates in tobacco and tomatoes using the new system, outperforming many existing tissue culture-free transformation methods. Even in soybeans, a notoriously difficult species for genetic modification, the researchers achieved gene-editing with minimal reliance on conventional tissue culture.
"The development of a tissue-culture-free transformation system represents a major leap forward for agricultural research," said Clint Krehbiel , dean of the Davis College of Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources . "This breakthrough not only accelerates crop improvement but also demonstrates how our faculty and students are addressing some of the most pressing challenges in global food security and sustainable production."
The research marks a major milestone in plant synthetic biology and positions Texas Tech at the forefront of sustainable agricultural innovation. Future work will focus on adapting this approach to other major food and energy crops, including cereals and legumes, and integrating it with precision genome editing technologies to accelerate breeding for global food security.
"Our ultimate goal is to develop a universal platform for plant transformation, one that cuts the time from discovery to improved crop variety by half or more," Patil said. "This has implications not only for research, but also for tackling real-world challenges like environmental resilience, disease resistance and improved nutrient use efficiency."
Postdoctoral scientist Kaushik Ghose and Vikas Devkar, working in Patil's lab , also contributed to this work.
