Scientists at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR)-Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI) in Cuttack, Odisha, led by Kutubuddin Ali Molla, have developed and validated a platform named “Plant-OpenCRISPR1” (POC1).
This represents the first AI-designed genome-editing platform in the world for plants, developed utilizing rice as a model crop. The POC1 platform facilitates advanced gene knockout, base editing, and prime editing in rice crops using AI-designed enzymes, surpassing conventional Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) technologies.
It is to be noted that the research findings have been accepted for publication in the international journal “New Phytologist”.