Daniel Voytas

Dr. Voytas’ lab is currently developing methods for plant gene editing to advance basic biology and develop new crop varieties. Plant gene editing is usually carried out by delivering reagents such as Cas9 and sgRNAs to explants in culture. Edited cells are then induced to differentiate into whole plants by exposure to various hormones. Creating edited plants through tissue culture is often inefficient, requires considerable time, only works with limited species and genotypes, and causes unintended changes to the genome and epigenome. Dr. Voytas’ lab has been pursuing alternative approaches for plant gene editing that minimize or obviate the need for tissue culture. In one approach, gene-edited plants are generated through de novo meristem induction. Developmental regulators and gene editing reagents are delivered to somatic cells on whole plants. Meristems are induced that produce shoots with targeted DNA modifications, and gene edits are transmitted to the next generation. In a second approach, RNA viruses are used to deliver sgRNAs through infection to transgenic plants that express Cas9. The sgRNAs are augmented with sequences that promote cell-to-cell mobility and movement into the meristem. Gene-edited shoots are thus generated that transmit gene edits to the next generation. Because both approaches minimize the need for tissue culture, they promise to help overcome this requirement for making targeted genome modifications in plants.

Dr. Dan Voytas is a Professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development at the University of Minnesota (UMN). Dr. Voytas is also Director of the UMN’s Center for Precision Plant Genomics. Dr. Voytas graduated from Harvard College in 1984 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1990. He conducted postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he was a fellow of the Life Science Research Foundation. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota in 2008, Dr. Voytas was a professor at Iowa State University. Dr. Voytas’ research focuses on developing methods to edit plant genomes. His laboratory developed a powerful genome editing reagent — Transcription Activator-Like Effector Nucleases (TALENs) — which was heralded by Science magazine as one of the top ten scientific breakthroughs of 2012. In addition to his position at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Voytas co-founded Calyxt, an agricultural biotechnology company that used gene editing for crop improvement and launched the world’s first gene-edited food ingredient. In 2019, Dr. Voytas was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.