Curators' Distinguished Professor/Member & Principal Investigator
Division of Plant Science and Technology/Donald Danforth Plant Science Center
Biochemistry, Cell & Molecular Biology, Genetics & Plant Breeding, Plant Pathology,
Research
Dr. Yang’s group has used rice as a workhorse to develop genome editing technologies and demonstrate their promising potential as biotech tools for basic and applied research in rice and other crop plants. With the increasingly available sequences of many plant genomes, technologies for genome editing have become the most promising and popular tools for scientists to understand such complex genomes and precisely and quickly manipulate them for good. Genome editing technologies allow precise, targeted genomic changes. TALENs and CRISPR/Cas represent the state-of-the-art genome editing technologies and hold immense promise for defining the genetic and molecular basis for valuable traits, as well as for the introgression of valuable genes/traits into cultivated varieties in a timely and economically sound manner.