Davis, California, USA
December 8, 2025
Imtiyaz Khanday, left, and Venkatesan Sundaresan with cloned rice plants in a greenhouse on the UC Davis campus in 2018. The team has created rice plants that produce seeds that are clones of themselves -- a breakthrough that could revolutionize global agriculture by making it cheaper and easier for farmers to plant high-performing hybrid crops. Sundaresan and Khanday were recently recognized for their work with a VinFuture Prize. (UC Davis photo)
Two researchers at the University of California, Davis, have been awarded a VinFuture Prize recognizing their work to develop self-cloning crops, a breakthrough for sustainable agriculture.
Venkatesan Sundaresan is a distinguished professor, and Imtiyaz Khanday is an assistant professor, both in the Department of Plant Sciences. They traveled to Hanoi, Vietnam, to receive the prize at a VinFuture Foundation ceremony on Dec. 5 and will share the $500,000 VinFuture Special Prize for Innovators with Outstanding Achievements in Emerging Fields.
The prize was created in 2021 to honor emerging research fields and innovations that have the potential to create positive changes for humanity.
“I’m honored that the global impact of our research is being recognized in this way,” Khanday said. “I come from a farming family, and I’ve always wanted to develop technologies that help farmers, especially smallholder farmers. We’re trying to make better seeds for the world.”
Cloning for sustainability
As the world’s climate warms and the human population increases, creating sustainable agricultural systems is an urgent priority. One way to immediately increase yield is to sow hybrid crops, the offspring of two genetically different varieties, which can produce up to 50 percent more grain than their parents. But when those hybrids reproduce, their offsprings’ yield is unpredictable, which means that farmers who want the sustained benefits of hybrids must purchase new seed each year.
Sundaresan and Khanday’s work created hybrid crops that bypass sexual reproduction by cloning themselves, which means that their high yields can be maintained for generations.
“Making crop hybrids widely available to smallholder farmers can meet food demands for the 21st century sustainably, without increasing land use or agricultural inputs,” said Sundaresan. “It will have vast impacts on millions of rice farmers and billions of people in developing countries for whom rice is the major caloric source.”
Producing self-cloning plants requires two key steps. First, the researchers used CRISPR/Cas-9 methods to switch off genes related to meiosis, which ensures that the plant’s egg cells have a full set of chromosomes. Then, they activated a gene called BBM1 which triggers the egg cells to develop into embryos without the need for fertilization.
This method mimics a process called apomixis that occurs naturally in hundreds of plant species, including blackberries and oranges. The resulting embryos have identical genetic makeup as their parents and, because their offspring also reproduce clonally, farmers can save their seeds to plant in subsequent years.
The global impact of basic research
The team’s prize-winning innovation emerged from basic research supported by federal grants, highlighting how scientific discoveries — and the impactful applications they enable — are often serendipitous. Their work was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Experiment Station, the Innovative Genomics Institute and the France-Berkeley Fund.
“When we started out, we weren't even working on this problem,” said Sundaresan. “We were just trying to understand how plants make embryos.”
Khanday discovered BBM1’s role in triggering embryo activation while working as a postdoctoral fellow in Sundaresan’s lab. At around the same time, Raphael Mercier from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany and Emmanuel Guiderdoni and Delphine Mieulet from CIRAD(French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development) in Montpellier, France, figured out a way to prevent meiosis in rice. When the two groups joined forces, synthetic apomixis was born.
The team unveiled their self-cloning technique in rice in 2018. Since then, they discovered another gene that increases the success rate to around 90 percent. They have also demonstrated that synthetic apomixis is possible in maize and an independent research group recently used their method to induce apomixis in sorghum.
An emerging field with global impact
Sundaresan and Khanday are working to further expand the potential of self-cloning hybrids. While Sundaresan is pursuing ways to optimize the technology in rice and other cereal crops, Khanday is working to develop self-cloning vegetable crops, starting with potatoes and tomatoes.
“You can preserve any desirable genotype with this technology, whether that’s disease resistance or climate tolerance,” said Khanday. “Synthetic apomixis has the potential to impact agriculture globally, especially for smallholder farmers.”
Sundaresan and Khanday share the prize with Mercier, Guiderdoni and Mieulet. The team joins an illustrious group of awardees: Previous winners of the prize include the inventors of CAR-T cancer immunotherapy; the Nobel Prize-winning developers of AlphaFold; and the researchers who discovered the GLP-1 pathway, which enabled the invention of Ozempic and related weight-loss drugs.
“We are poised on what I hope will be a new revolution in agriculture,” said Sundaresan. “Our invention means that the benefits of hybrid crops will become available, equitable and accessible to farmers all over the world. This is hugely important for achieving sustainable food production.”
Related links
The VinFuture Foundation is a nonprofit based in Vietnam that seeks to showcase "transformational technological innovations" that create "meaningful change in the everyday lives" of millions of ordinary people. Learn more here.
Sundaresan enjoys a dual appointment with the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences.
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