Moving towards chemical-free agriculture, 37 kb at a time

Domestic crop plants are modern marvels of extensive breed-ing; however, many of their natural defenses against pests andpathogens have been lost. Wild relatives still harbor disease re-sistance genes, but transferring these large sequences into com-plex, polyploid plant genomes calls for advanced genomicengineering technologies. Recently, government researchers inAustralia, successfully transferred a 37 kb resistance stack intothe genome of a domesticated wheat species such that it is pro-tected against the rapidly evolving wheat leaf rust pathogenPuccinia graminis f. sp. tritici (Pgt) without losing any agronomic feature