Project update: It worked!

Prime editing in corn has only been achieved in a handful of labs in the world, so even though the team is quite good, I still expected it would take at least 9 months to get our first successful prime edit, with substantial probability mass on "it never works".

To my great surprise, the team got it working within the first 3 months of trying. They've now succeeded on 2 different nutrition-related genes. At the behest of the scientist leading the project I held my tongue about the success until she had staked priority, but we recently co-submitted a conference abstract describing the preliminary results (which will eventually be public and I will link it here, though I hear this often takes many months for this particular conference).

With this initial success, I've been thinking about ways to expand the prime editing program, and have a lot of fun ideas in mind. Thanks ACX Grants for getting this project off the ground.

Updates hopefully coming in the next 18 months, in their most likely order: when the conference abstract goes public, when we invest in a bigger prime editing project now that the technology is demonstrably working, and when we've grown the corn for 2 generations to establish homozygous transgene-free edited lines that we can grow in the field and test their nutritional content to see whether the edit improved nutrition like we hope. My best guess is that those are 6, 12, and 18 months in the future, with substantial uncertainty on all 3.