Cibus announces breakthrough in wheat regeneration from single cell

Cibus announced that the Company has successfully regenerated plants from single cells in a wheat cultivar. This is a major breakthrough for Cibus as well as for the industry. “In this tour de force, I am proud of our team’s persistence, the result of which is the opening of a scalable gene editing process in wheat, which is a major global crop and an important food staple,” said Greg Gocal, Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of Cibus. Initially sequenced a mere five years ago, wheat genomes are some of the largest of all crops, having more than 16 billion letters. They are also very complex with durum wheat comprising the fusion of two genomes and bread wheat from the fusion of three. Given this breakthrough, Cibus intends to develop a family of traits to address the most significant challenges faced by farmers globally for wheat, focusing initially on disease resistance and nitrogen use efficiency.