An AI-designed gene editor, free for anyone to use, just taught rice to resist a devastating disease

Bacterial blight can wipe out rice harvests, and rice feeds half the world. At the University of Missouri, Yang Bing's team took OpenCRISPR-1 — a gene-editing tool designed by artificial intelligence and released open-source, free for research and commercial use — and adapted it for plants for the first time. With it, they edited rice genes that the blight bacterium exploits, producing plants that fight off the disease. Because the tool carries no licensing toll, researchers and breeders anywhere can build on it — for blight today, and potentially for drought and heat tolerance in corn, soybeans and other staples tomorrow. The work was published in the journal aBIOTECH; field varieties are still some years away.

SDG 2 · Zero hunger — Mechanism: tech innovation