Engineers and plant scientists at Iowa State, including several members of the Crop Bioengineering Center, worked together to improve a DNA delivery system for enhancing basic and biotechnology research for plants. The result is a low-cost gene gun upgrade that enables more efficient and consistent gene editing—boosting delivery performance up to 22-fold. Featured in Nature Communications and partially funded by a CBC seed grant, this innovation could accelerate the development of crops that better withstand heat, offer improved nutrition, or support renewable energy.
Read the full Iowa State news article.
Read the paper: “Enhancing biolistic plant transformation and genome editing with a flow guiding barrel,” Nature Communications, July 1, 2025.