It was the first staple crop to be successfully engineered and widely planted.
In the last decade various traits such as biotic stress resistance, quality and storage life have been successfully engineered into vegetable crops and some of them have been commercialized.
Synthetic functional RNAs, such as in vitro selected small-molecule-binding aptamers, have also been successfully engineered to produce predictable and controllable gene expression.
Spontaneously flowing liquids have been successfully engineered from a variety of biological and synthetic self-propelled units1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11.
Medea is a selfish genetic element that has been found in natural Tribolium beetle populations (Beeman et al. 1992) and has been successfully engineered in Drosophila (Chen et al. 2007).
Many tissues have already been successfully engineered into 3-D format, including the liver and cardiovascular tissues (Nirmalanandhan and Sittampalam, 2009; Pampaloni et al., 2009; Hastings et al., 2009; Hastings et al., 2007).
In addition, RNAs exhibiting properties of both riboswitches and ribozymes have been successfully engineered to function in cells, demonstrating their potential to be developed into useful biological tools.
A number of gene-drive mechanisms have been proposed (Sinkins and Gould 2006), and one drive mechanism, Medea, has recently been successfully engineered in Drosophila (Chen et al. 2007).
PHB has been successfully engineered in a number of plant species [ 9] and has potential applications not only as a bio-plastic but also for the manufacture of chemicals and improved animal feed [ 9– 13].
Derived from the microbial CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat) type II adaptive immune system, Cas9 has now been successfully engineered for genome editing applications in a variety of animal and plant species.
