On the road to the Holy Grail of agriculture

On the road to the Holy Grail of agriculture: "Right now, farmers have to buy new hybrid seeds each year to ensure that each season’s harvest is as vigorous as the last. But a new method of cloning seeds holds the potential to change all that.

The method would allow geneticists to engineer seeds that produce clones of their parent plants, an advance that could lead to self-propagating clones in the future and revolutionize the way the world farms.

“This is a big step,” said Simon Chan, a geneticist in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of California Davis and one of the researchers of the study reported last week in Science magazine. “It’s not the final product, but it’s a major step toward making plants that make exact clones of themselves for seeds,” he said."