CRISPR: A Climate Change Resilience and Food Safety Milestone
by Jeffrey Wang (Global Food Safety Forum/Biofuels Digest) Developing a sustainable global food system that ensures access to a sufficient supply of nutritious, diverse and safe food for all, and simultaneously limits the impact on the environment, is one of the key challenges in the next few decades. Therefore, identifying technologies and sustainable agricultural practices that can adapt to climate change as well as reduce agricultural carbon intensity is a crucial task for policymakers, food suppliers, and even institutional and private investors. In this newsletter, we focus on one such technology that could potentially be an integral part of solving the food system challenge — Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR).
CRISPR technology is the latest watershed advance in genome-editing that has particularly significant implications for crop-engineering and agriculture. Researchers at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), a joint partnership between UC Berkeley and UCSF, discovered a particular protein that can target and cut specific viral DNA, known as the CRISPR-Cas9. Using CRISPR genome-editing, researchers were able to remove, insert, and change sequences of DNA in nearly any organism.
Due to CRISPR’s specific nature, the application of the technology can improve the conventional food crop in several ways. For example, publications on CRISPR’s application in tomatoes alone demonstrate the promising prospects of the technology in tackling food security, safety and environmental sustainability challenges.1 CRISPR’s ability to target viral DNA sequences can allow crops to develop resistance to diseases. By modifying the tomato genes that confer antiviral characteristics, researchers have successfully engineered tomato plants’ immunity to RNA viruses, thus significantly boosting crop yield.2
The same concept could be used to target pathogenic bacterial infections that conventional agricultural chemicals find hard to control. By building genetic resistance to Pseudomonas syringae, the causative agent of bacterial speck disease in tomato plants, the technology could significantly reduce the exposure of humans to food-borne diseases.
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Currently, CRISPR faces little federal regulation in the US and researchers, from private companies and academic institutions, are rapidly field testing with newly CRISPR-engineered plant crops. READ MORE
