News & Events

Chromatin's co-founders Daphne Preuss (CEO) and Gregory P. Copenhaver profile an exciting new technology for generating doubled-haploid plants in today's issue of Nature Biotechnology (2010, 28:423-424;

The technology was developed by Simon Chan and his colleague Maruthachalam Ravi at the University of California Davis and was published in the March issue of Nature (2010, 464: 615-618). They used the model plant Arabidopsis to demonstrate that perturbation of a centromere binding protein (CENH3) can induce controlled chromosome loss in developing embryos resulting in haploid plants containing chromosomes from only one parent. The haploid plants spontaneously produced diploid (doubled-haploid) progeny at a low but consistent frequency. Because doubled-haploid plants are fully homozygous they have been highly prized among plant breeders, but their availability has been commercially limited to a few species-specific systems. The Chan & Ravi technology, by contrast, is potentially applicable in a wide variety of species and may therefore be a significant leap forward in plant biotechnology.