Turning plants blue with gene editing could make robot weeding easier

Common crops, like wheat or maize, could be genetically altered to be brightly coloured to make it easier for weeding robots to do their job, suggest researchers. Weeding reduces the need for herbicides, but the artificial intelligence models that power weeding robots can struggle to differentiate between crops and weeds that are a similar shape and colour. To get round this problem, Pedro Correia at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and his colleagues have suggested that crop genomes could be adapted to express pigments such as anthocyanins, which make blueberries blue, or carotenoids, which make carrots orange. Crops could also be grown to have unusually shaped leaves or to have characteristics that are invisible to the naked eye but detectable by sensors, such as in the infrared spectrum, they say. Correia says AI's struggles with weeding could be exacerbated as wild species are adapted for agriculture to capitalise on their abilities to cope with a changing climate.