Unlocking hybrid vigor: a new genic male sterile gene <i>in da house</i>

Seed and fruit production, the foundation of the human food supply, relies on sexual reproduction in plants.In flowering plants, pollen grains produced in the anthers fertilize ovules, forming seeds that will be protected inside the fruits.Many plants preferentially self-pollinate (Irish, 2017), but this natural process can be agronomically disadvantageous.Many plant breeders prefer to cross-pollinate their plants to produce hybrids with an improved agronomic performance compared to their parents, a phenomenon called hybrid vigor (Groszmann et al., 2014) .Those hybrids are typically obtained either by artificial interventions