Cisgenics, High Speed Breeding

Good ol’ foresters have engineered a new form of genetic engineering that allows for gene exchanges within a single species:

“Until now, most applications of biotechnology have been done with transgenics, in which you take genetic traits from one plant or animal and transfer them into an unrelated species,” said Steven Strauss, a distinguished professor of forest biotechnology at OSU. “By contrast, cisgenics uses whole genes from the same plant or a very closely related species. We may be able to improve on the slow and uncertain process of plant breeding with greater speed and certainty of effect.”

This is possible in part because of the growing knowledge about what specific genes do in plants and animals, and enormous increases in the speed of genome sequencing, or mapping them out in their entirety. Sequencing that used to take years can now be accomplished in days.