A pot of pretty petunias will practically sell itself, but petunias don’t retain their beauty for long. A joint Israeli-American “precise breeding” project is now working toward extending the shelf-life of these popular flowers. The three-year collaboration brings together a patented plant-breeding technology called MemoGene, developed by Israel’s Danziger Innovations and the Hebrew University’s Yissum tech-transfer company, with a DNA editing platform developed by Precision Biosciences in North Carolina. The platform’s biological “scissors” will be tailored to cut open the flower’s genome at exactly the right spot for MemoGene to deliver the life-extending trait. “It’s a perfect symbiosis, because we each have a piece of a two-piece puzzle,” says Hanne Volpin, deputy CEO and head of R&D at Danziger Innovations. “We have the technology to deliver tools to make the modification to the genome, while Precision Biosciences owns the [intellectual property] for the biological scissors that cut the genome.”

The partnership is supported by a grant from the BIRD (Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development) Foundation awarded in December last year. “This new technology enables and democratizes the process of crop perfection, because until now only very large corporations like Monsanto were active in this area,” BIRD Director of Business Development Ron Maron tells ISRAEL21c. “Now, smaller companies and even university startups can get into this field and offer quicker and cheaper new traits to plant breeders.” It’s fitting that the petunia project has an Israeli partner. “Plant breeding started in the Middle East and a few other places about 8,000 years ago, and we’re continuing the tradition,” Maron points out. (via Israel21c)

[Photo: Patty Vicknair / Flickr ]