“Genetic engineering” became too scary a phrase, so the wordsmiths created “genetic editing”. But even that must now be too scary, so we now call it “directed evolution”:

Directed evolution comes to plants

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To experimentally build their directed evolution platform, Mahfouz and his colleagues used a combination of targeted mutagenesis and artificial selection in the rice plant,Oryza sativa. They took advantage of the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR to generate DNA breaks at more than 100 sites throughout theSF3B1 gene, which encodes a protein involved in the processing of other gene transcripts. After manipulating the DNA of small bundles of rice cells in this way, the researchers then grew the mutated seedlings in the presence of herboxidiene, a herbicide that normally targets the SF3B1 protein to inhibit plant growth and development.

This strategy ultimately yielded more than 20 new rice variants with mutations that conferred resistance to herboxidiene to varying degrees. In collaboration with Stefan Arold’s group at the KAUST Computational Bioscience Research Center, Mahfouz and his colleagues then characterized the structural basis of the resistance—showing, for example, how particular mutations helped destabilize herbicide binding to the SF3B1 protein.

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Genetic engineering by any other name is still genetic engineering.