The clone rangers

The two men - Indian-American biologists - were studying plant embryos when they realised they could create the world’s first engineered self-cloning grains. After positive results with rice, they have moved on to maize, millets, potatoes. ‘What works with rice is potentially applicable to all flowering plants,’ Sundaresan says. Is that as dramatic as it sounds? An interview

- Gowri S

It is one of mankind’s oldest questions: How can we grow enough food?

Indian-American plant biologists Venkatesan Sundaresan, 73, and Imtiyaz Khanday, 40, weren't even looking to answer it, really.

In 2015, they were studying exactly how plant embryos work at the cellular level, when they identified a set of genes in rice flowers that appeared to kickstart it all. Used right, they realised, these genes could help rice become the world’s first engineered self-cloning plant.

While certain fruits, berries and weeds (such as the dandelion) do reproduce asexually (or clone themselves) in the wild, the world’s major food crops are inherently sexual. For more than 30 years, efforts to get them to clone themselves had failed.

By the time Sundaresan and Khanday isolated their group of rice genes and published their first paper on their research in 2015, though, something massive had shifted.

In 2012, the biochemist Jennifer Doudna and her fellow researcher Emmanuelle Charpentier created the CRISPR-Cas9 “molecular scissors” (for which they would win a Nobel Prize in 2020).

Genes could now be snipped, cut and pasted quickly, precisely and easily. The tool revolutionised medical research, conservation efforts, food hybridisation, resiliencebuilding in crops.

At University of California, Davis, it gave two professors working on rice flowers a means towards a long-awaited end.

Working with teams of researchers in France and Germany, in 2017, they engineered a rice plant whose seeds grew into a clone of the parent. Since then, they have worked to raise success rates from about 30% to 95%. The next step will be field trials.

Sundaresan and Khanday recently won the prestigious $500,000 VinFuture Prize, awarded by the Vietnamese construction billionaire Pham Nhat Vuong’s VinFuture Foundation, for research that addresses some of the world’s most pressing problems.