Strategies and challenges for synthetic apomixis

Harnessing heterosis has been important to agriculture, but its full potential remains constrained by the inability to clonally propagate hybrid seeds. Synthetic apomixis, engineering asexual seed formation in sexual crops, provides a path to fix heterosis through generations. This review compiles current advances in engineering synthetic apomixis, focusing on two major components: the substitution of mitosis for meiotic divisions and maternally derived embryo development by haploid inducer or parthenogenesis. Despite rapid progress made in rice, significant challenges remain for general implementation and extension to other crops. We discuss these challenges and the possible paths forward to make synthetic apomixis feasible for widespread application in agriculture.