Humans have domesticated numerous crops, but trees have largely escaped us. This is because breeding new tree varieties takes many decades.1 Now, a team has combined machine learning and advanced CRISPR technology to create trees with desirable traits for both industry and the environment in a fraction of the time.
Wood consists of about 25 percent lignin,2 but the paper and fiber industries remove it because it lowers the quality of their products—for instance, by yellowing paper that comes in contact with air. Lowering the lignin content in the trees themselves would reduce the need for that process, said genome editing specialist Rodolphe Barrangou at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and coauthor of the paper, which was recently published in Science.3
Barrangou and his colleagues used a predictive machine learning model to identify genes in poplar trees (Populus trichocarpa) that they could modify to create ideal traits for fiber productions, ...
