Coordinating structure-guided design and cis-regulatory optimization to engineer elite herbicide-tolerance alleles in crops.

Dual-layer allele engineering combining structure-guided protein design and cis-regulatory tuning produces rice alleles with herbicide resistance up to four times the recommended field rate.

• Why it matters: Current genome editing approaches often modify a single genetic axis, limiting the durability and effectiveness of trait improvements without causing functional trade-offs, which hampers crop enhancement efforts.
• What they did: The study developed a dual-layer framework that integrates structural analysis for designing functional coding variants and precise cis-regulatory modifications, tested in rice and applied successfully in polyploid wheat.
• The result: This approach generated combinatorial coding and regulatory variants with significantly improved herbicide resistance, establishing a versatile, cross-species platform for precise crop trait engineering.