That’s the big holdup right now on making some of these wish-list crops, such as plants that can grow in soils saturated by salty encroaching seawater, flower properly in the shorter days of northern latitudes, or produce higher yields with less water and fertilizer. Most crop plants have upwards of 30,000 genes, and dozens if not hundreds of varieties. Sorting through them to find a stretch of DNA that protects plants from intolerable heat stress, say, is still going to take time. Only once it’s found can you start thinking about using gene editing to recreate that sequence in your beloved coffee plants and Chardonnay grape vines. (Because yeah, the most delicious foods are going to be the first to go.)

But one of the things that gives Qi hope is that before Crispr, such screening studies were only possible in a small number of model organisms—plants like rice and maize and an herbaceous mustard relative called Arabidopsis. But since Crispr can cut DNA equally well in any organism, scientists have started to explore the genomes of more exotic plants, including those that grow in extreme environments. Once they’ve identified genes for traits like growing in saltwater or enduring long droughts, they can try to evolve those same traits in food crops by creating hundreds of plants with random mutations to the gene of interest, and then growing them under the kinds of conditions they’re likely to encounter in a future climate-altered world. “Can we make plants evolve faster to these extreme environments? I think we can,” says Qi.

One reason you’d do that, instead of just cutting and pasting the gene from one plant to another, is to avoid red tape that could cost years and tens of millions of dollars. In the US, gene-edited crops aren’t regulated, so long as the genetic alteration could have theoretically been bred into the plant from a reproductively compatible relative.

The other reason is Crispr’s cut-and-paste function doesn’t really work yet in plants. Cutting, it’s got down. But inserting a new strand of DNA, not so much. That’s a project UC Davis plant biologist Pamela Ronald is working on with the Innovative Genomics Institute (which is headed by Crispr pioneer Jennifer Doudna). They’re honing this gene replacement technique first in rice. If they can get it to work, they could move DNA between rice varieties much faster. And in a race against climate meltdown, every second counts. No one knows this better than Ronald.

In the 1990s, Ronald and her lab embarked on a project to sequence and understand a trait in an ancient variety of rice that can tolerate intense flooding, allowing the crop to survive even if submerged for weeks. Most varieties can only tolerate three days. And each year, flooding destroys 4 million tons of rice in India and Bangladesh—lost meals for 30 million people. Over the next decade, her collaborators used DNA-assisted breeding techniques to eventually produce local varieties of rice that could yield 60 percent more in times of extreme flooding. Today, Ronald says, more than six million farmers are growing the submergence-tolerant rice.

“The basic biology is still unknown for a lot of these traits, like reducing methane emissions and drought tolerance,” says Ronald. “Figuring that out is a huge amount of work. So it’s hard to say where exactly the breakthrough is going to be. But what’s gotten people really excited about genome editing is that at least in the US it won’t be regulated, which will make it much easier to get out in the hands of farmers to see if it actually makes a difference.”