For quite a few years, UT Professor David Fernandez Rivas has been working on needle-free injection technology. His research gained momentum when he received an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council in 2019, to further develop his technology for controlled injections without needles. Now, a surprising new application has emerged: crop resilience.
There were quite a few ideas on how the technology could make a societal impact, in particular in the medical field: it was thought about administering vaccines or tattooing. In a surprising plot twist, fellow researchers Tom van den Berg and Pep Canyelles Pericàs approached David with a new idea to exploit his technology: to enable efficient gene-editing of any plant, a promising approach in developing strong, resilient crops. The team now receives a Proof of Concept Grant from the ERC to help to find out how to.
Climate resilience
Food security is a growing problem. The population keeps growing and a changing climate creates increasing risks in growing plants that threaten food supply all over the globe. The three researchers came to realise that it should be possible to revolutionise plant transformations by enabling direct and efficient DNA-free transformation of any plant meristematic tissue via precise solvent jet injections.
Their approach is to inject into the cell nucleus, with minimal damage. By doing so, they plan to reduce the time and cost of generating gene-edited crops and to generate affordable, high-throughput devices that enable the fast and efficient transformation of crops. The UT collaborators expanded their team with expertise from Wageningen University (BioNanoTechnology) and Wageningen Research (Plant Breeding) groups, and industry innovator Hudson River Biotechnology. Project collaborators help the team to adapt the technique for the crop breeding plant sector, posing the jet injection method as a true platform technology enabler.
ERC Proof of Concept
Proof of Concept grants, worth €150,000 each, aim to help researchers who are currently conducting or have recently conducted ERC-funded research, to explore the commercial or societal potential of their ERC-funded work. The grants can be used in various ways, for example, to explore business opportunities, prepare patent applications or verify the practical viability of scientific concepts.
