To robotize cross-pollination, researchers "recycled" soybean and tomato flowers using CRISPR-Cas9.

Manual pollination in breeding requires significant time and financial costs. The robotization of processes on some crops is complicated by the intricacies of flower forms, where the stigmas are hidden deep within the flower. Chinese researchers, using gene editing, have altered the shapes of tomato and soybean flowers and developed a robot equipped with a dexterous "hand" and artificial intelligence, which performs the necessary manipulations on such plants accurately, quickly, and continuously.

The pursuit of high-yield, climate-resistant, and flavorful crops depends on hybrid breeding—crossbreeding different parent lines to obtain the best traits. However, the first crucial step, cross-pollination, has so far remained manual. As reported by AgroPages, this is because the very architecture of some crops, such as tomatoes and soybeans, posed an insurmountable obstacle for robots. "Imagine a tiny, recessed target hidden deep within the complex structure of a flower. This is the stigma. Human hands, thanks to their dexterity and vision, could do this, albeit slowly and expensively. But for a robotic arm, accessing this recessed target without damaging the surrounding organs was almost impossible," explains Professor Xu Cao, the lead researcher of the project. According to him, this obstacle required enormous resources: manual pollination accounts for over 25% of the cost of growing fresh tomatoes in China alone, and the process of emasculation (removal of male organs) takes ...