crispr is coming to agriculture — with big implications for food, farmers, consumers and nature
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Collapse ▲Gene editing offers dramatic advances in speed, scope and scale of genetic improvement. It also offers an opportunity for more nuanced GMO governance.
Maywa Montenegro @MaywaMontenegro
Food systems researcher, UC Berkeley
January 28, 2016 — Very few technologies truly merit the epithet “game changer” — but a new genetic engineering tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 is one of them. Since we first developed the ability to alter the genetic material inside a plant or animal in the 1970s, efforts to do so have required weeks, months or even years of molecular tinkering. With CRISPR (the technology’s shorthand name), precision and speed have soared.
“In the past, it was a student’s entire Ph.D. thesis to change one gene,” Bruce Conklin, a geneticist at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, recently told The New York Times. “CRISPR just knocked that out of the park.”
The tool is also extremely versatile and seems to work in nearly every creature and cell type in which it has been tried. In the words of Jill Wildonger of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, “It really opens up the genome of virtually every organism that’s been sequenced to be edited and engineered.”
And that, when it comes to agriculture and the environment, is both its promise and its peril. CRISPR opens the door to all kinds of potential food production improvements. But improvements for whom? Farmers? Consumers? Agribusiness? Sustainable farming systems? Industrial agriculture? And who will decide?
If we want to make sure this powerful technology promotes just and sustainable food, we’ll need to accompany its development with a policy framework that reflects the nuances of its biology and its diverse applications — and that responds to the concerns of people who are affected when technologies migrate from lab to land.
Game-changing Tool
CRISPR as a gene-editing tool has a complex origin story, with researchers in California and Massachusetts waging a patent war over its innovation, while recent stories tell of independent discoveries at Vilnius University in Lithuania. For our purposes, I’ll focus on what happened here at the University of California, Berkeley where in 2011, Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist and molecular biologist, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, a microbiologist now at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany, grew intrigued by the way many bacteria respond to viral invasions. The microbes, it turns out, have an uncanny ability: They store DNA from invading viruses in a sort of genetic library called CRISPR. If the same virus should attack again, the bacteria can use CRISPR to mobilize an enzyme called Cas9 to cut up the intruder’s corresponding DNA.