Plant genome engineering is embarking towards the marriage of improved genome editing tools with increasing knowledge of plant biology. As climate change continues to perturb atmospheric conditions on our planet, we face the dire challenge of ensuring crop adaptations to increasing droughts and limited nutrients.

Furthermore, as the global population continues to grow every year, we need to ensure sufficient crop yields in the future to feed this growing planet. The use of CRISPR in agriculture should be considered as simply a new breeding method that can produce identical results to conventional methods in a much more predictable, faster, and even cheaper manner.

Dr. Gao received her Ph.D. degree from the China Agricultural University in 1997. From 1997 to 2009, she served as a Research Scientist at DLF’s biotechnology group in Denmark, where she worked on plant genetic transformation and molecular biology.

Now she is a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research group focuses on developing precision genome editing technologies and establishing foundational methods for using genome editing to breed new and sustainable crops. She has developed new crops that are more nutritious, disease resistant, and stress tolerant.

Her research was selected as one of 2016 MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies and one of the most cited Nature Biotechnology papers over its 20-year history in 2016. Also in 2016, Caixia was selected as one of Nature’s ten science stars of China.