Federal Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau on Wednesday announced updated guidance from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency that sets gene-edited seeds on the same regulatory level as conventionally-bred seed varieties.

Taken with last year’s related updates by the federal health department to Canada’s Novel Food Regulations, CFIA’s new opinion opens the door for gene-edited seeds’ unregulated use in Canadian fields.

Grower groups whose members have waited years for gene-edited seed to come to Canada lined up Wednesday to hail CFIA’s decision as a potential watershed moment for the domestic ag industry.

But advocates for Canadian organic growers, whose buyers consider gene-edited to also be genetically modified, say the decision will leave the organic sector dependent on seed and biotech firms’ willingness to disclose their handiwork.

Risks not ‘unique or identifiable’

In its updated directive, CFIA said it’s the “scientific opinion of (the agency) that gene-editing technologies do not present any unique or specifically identifiable environmental or human health safety concerns as compared to other technologies of plant development.”

With that in mind, CFIA said it “does not foresee an outcome of conventional breeding where an authorization for environmental release would be required, other than in the case of herbicide-tolerant plants.”

In other words, a company wanting to release a plant with novel traits (PNT) will still need to apply for, and receive, CFIA authorization before that plant is released into the environment — that is, if the PNT still has any DNA from foreign organisms, and/or a new commercially-viable herbicide tolerance trait.

That would also apply to any gene-edited PNT in which any foreign DNA used to encode “gene-editing machinery” — such as in the CRISPR process — remains in the final product and hasn’t been removed through rounds of breeding and selection.

In cases where a plant isn’t a PNT, CFIA said, a plant’s proponents are “expected to fully participate in mechanisms that provide transparency about non-novel products” — such as the Health Canada Transparency Initiative and the Canadian Variety Transparency Database.

It also “remains the proponent’s responsibility to notify the CFIA if the plant could have significant negative environmental impacts and be considered a PNT.”

CFIA said its decision follows consultations with plant breeding, industry and regulatory experts and stakeholders, as well as a public consultation that ran from May through September 2021.

In its release Wednesday, the federal ag department noted the U.S., Japan, Australia, Argentina and Brazil have already “clarified the pathway” for gene-edited products, while New Zealand, the U.K. and the European Union (EU) “are in the process of doing so.”

‘Trusted and safe’

Canada’s competitiveness in world ag markets — and its crops’ resilience against environmental and climate stresses — were common themes among the groups hailing CFIA’s decision Wednesday.

“The CFIA’s updated guidance helps Canada stay competitive on the global stage,” Krista Thomas, vice-president of seed innovation for the Canada Grains Council, said in a separate release.

“Many of our trading partners have already adopted similar science-based policies, and farmers outside of Canada have been growing gene edited crops since 2015. When we let the science be the core of regulatory decision making, we know that the end result can be trusted and is safe.”

Keith Currie, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, said in the government’s release that CFIA’s new guidance “will ultimately help Canadian farmers access new plant varieties that are more resilient to pests and extreme weather events and support our food security and sustainability objectives.”

Greg Sears of the Alberta Wheat Commission said seeds gene-edited for efficient use of resources give farmers “another opportunity to manage inputs more effectively, while sustaining ecosystems and reducing greenhouse gas” — an important development after another year in which Alberta growers “seeded the most expensive crop in recent history.”

Canola Council of Canada president Jim Everson said the guidance will also “encourage new and additional research and development investment in Canada.”

Soy Canada, in a separate statement, noted the country’s soy industry has “excelled at meeting diverse customer needs” including organic, non-genetically modified, genetically modified and identity-preserved soybeans — and meeting any such specific needs “remains an important priority for the industry.”

“Our customers know that we excel at providing a diverse range of products,” Soy Canada’s executive director Brian Innes said in a release. “We’re committed to continue providing customers what they want once we commercialize soybeans created using gene editing.”

‘Shocking’

Other groups, however, don’t expect the new guidance will assure buyers looking for non-GMO or organic crops from Canadian growers.

In a joint release Wednesday, several such groups said CFIA’s guidance means gene-edited crops that have no foreign DNA — and any foods produced from those crops — “will not go through any government approval process at Health Canada or the CFIA, but can be released onto the market by companies without any safety data submitted to the government.”

Given that organic standards allow only for conventionally-bred crops and not for gene-edited or genetically modified plants, the result will be “unknown (genetically modified) foods and seeds on the market that have not been subject to any independent safety assessment,” they said.

Lucy Sharratt, co-ordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, called CFIA’s guidance “a shocking abdication of responsibility by our regulators” that “asks Canadian farmers and consumers to trust unseen corporate science.”

Allowing gene-edited seed to enter Canadian agriculture unchallenged could “ultimately destroy the systems that farmers and many food companies have set up to deliver non-GM choices to consumers,” National Farmers Union president Jenn Pfenning said in the same release.

“This decision needs to be reversed, or over time, it will eliminate our ability to offer reliable non-GM food choices, including organic food.”

Garry Johnson, president of SaskOrganics, said “not ensuring full disclosure of all GM seeds through a mandatory public registry, will make it challenging for organic farmers to meet the requirements of the Canadian Organic Standards.”

‘Informed decisions’

In her release Wednesday, Bibeau said that “in light of discussions with the government-industry committee, we will protect the integrity of organic certification.”

Her announcement Wednesday included plans for creation of a “government-industry steering committee on plant breeding innovations transparency, to facilitate ongoing discussions as gene-edited products are introduced in the marketplace.”

Bibeau also said an expansion of the Seeds Canada Canadian Variety Transparency Database will provide transparency around individual seed varieties — and new federal oversight of that database “will ensure (its) completeness and robustness.”

Bibeau also committed Ottawa to “again provide funding to support the review of Canada’s organic standards.” Those standards, updated every five years, are next due for renewal in 2025.

CFA’s Currie, in the government’s release, said those commitments “will help ensure farmers can continue to make informed decisions on what they produce.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

The post Gene-edited crops clear CFIA’s regulatory bar appeared first on Farmtario.

Like the first cell phones that could only perform one function, the original CRISPR method can perform one function: removing or replacing genes in a genetic sequence. Later iterations of CRISPR were developed for another function that allowed scientists to change gene expression by turning them on or off without removing them from the genome. 

But each of these functions could only be performed independently in plants.

Now, scientists from the University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources have developed CRISPR-Combo, a method to edit multiple genes in plants while simultaneously changing the expression of other genes. This tool will enable genetic engineering combinations that work together to boost functionality and improve breeding of new crops.

“The possibilities are really limitless in terms of the traits that can be combined,” said Yiping Qi, an associate professor in the Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture and co-author of the study. 

The benefits of manipulating more than one gene at a time can far outweigh the benefits of any one manipulation on its own. For example, imagine a blight raging through wheat fields that threatens farmer livelihoods and food security. If scientists could remove a gene from the wheat that makes it susceptible to the blight and simultaneously turn on genes that shorten the plant’s life cycle and increase seed production, they could rapidly produce blight-resistant wheat before the disease had the chance to do too much damage.

That’s the type of engineering Qi and his team demonstrated in four different phases of experimentation.

Qi and his team had previously developed new CRISPR methods to regulate gene expression in plants and to edit multiple genes at the same time. But to develop CRISPR-Combo, they had to establish that they could perform both of those genetic engineering functions in parallel without negative consequences. 

“As a proof of concept, we showed that we could knock out gene A and upregulate, or activate, gene B successfully, without accidentally crossing over and knocking out gene B or upregulating Gene A,” Qi said.

Then Qi and his colleagues tested CRISPR-Combo on a flowering plant called rockcress (Arabidopsis), which is often used by researchers as a model for staple crops like corn and wheat. The researchers edited a gene that makes the plant more resistant to herbicides while activating a gene that causes early flowering, which produces seeds more quickly. The result was an herbicide-resistant rockcress plant that yielded eight generations in one year rather than the ordinary four.

The team then demonstrated how CRISPR-Combo could improve efficiency in plant breeding using tissue cultures from poplar trees. 

Some plants are better than others at regenerating from tissue cultures, which makes this step the single largest bottleneck in genetic engineering of crops. For some plants the success rate is just one per cent. 

Qi and his team addressed the bottleneck by first editing a few traits in poplar cells, then activating three genes that promote plant tissue regeneration.    

“We showed in poplars that our new method could offer a solution to the tissue regeneration bottleneck, dramatically increasing the efficiency of genetic engineering,” Qi said.

Currently, growing genetically engineered plants from tissue cultures requires the addition of growth hormones, which activate growth promoting genes. The research team shortcut this process in rice by directly activating these genes with CRISPR-Combo. The result was gene-edited rice from tissue cultures that did not require hormone supplementation. The researchers found that tissue cultures grown with their method expressed more of the edited gene than tissue grown using hormones.

“This method results in a highly efficient genome editing process,” Qi said.

Now that the team has demonstrated its CRISPR-Combo method works in a variety of plants for multiple purposes, they intend to conduct experiments in citrus, carrots and potatoes to test its viability in a fruit, vegetable and staple crop. They are also working to create herbicide resistant golden rice with enhanced nutritional content and red rice with increased antioxidants.

The post New CRISPR-Combo boosts genome editing power in plants appeared first on Farmtario.

It appears the department will treat gene-edited crops differently from genetically modified (transgenic) crops, which means the oversight of gene-edited crops could be closer to conventionally bred crops.

Gene editing is often described as removing or altering genetic sequences at precise locations in the genetic code. It’s different from transgenic plant technology, where DNA from another species, such as a bacterium, is inserted to achieve a desired trait.

Why it matters: It’s been nearly a year since Health Canada deemed gene editing safe for crops but it still faces strong opposition, delaying regulatory guidelines. 

The best known gene-editing tool is CRISPR-Cas9, a technique used to cut sections of DNA. Scientists from California and France won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of CRISPR.

If Health Canada does regulate gene-edited crops the same as conventional plant breeding, it would represent a win for the plant science industry and possibly Canadian farmers.

Supporters of gene-edited crops, including many plant breeders, believe it could revolutionize crop development. It will allow scientists to quickly and precisely change a plant’s DNA to achieve desired traits.

“Whether it’s developing a canola variety that is more resistant to disease, a high-fibre wheat crop, a soybean that produces a healthier oil or popular fruits and vegetables that don’t go brown as quickly… gene editing has the potential to offer benefits to farmers, food processors and consumers,” the Canada Grains Council said in March.

The Health Canada guidance on gene-edited crops is part of a larger department effort to modernize plant breeding regulations. Gene editing is the crucial piece that ag industry groups are watching because of the implications for plant breeding innovation.

Health Canada requires pre-market safety assessments for GM crops that can add millions or tens of millions of dollars to the cost of getting a variety to market.

However, a gene edited plant may not trigger regulation or an assessment. Oversight could be more like a conventionally bred crop.

On Dec. 6, Health Canada met with representatives of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN) and provided an update on its plan for gene-edited crops.

Two days later, CBAN issued a news release and condemned Health Canada’s plan.

“Under new regulatory guidance, Health Canada is removing its authority to regulate many new genetically modified foods developed with gene-editing techniques… and leave safety assessments to product developers instead,” said CBAN, a coalition of 16 groups, including the National Farmers Union and organic farm organizations, that raises awareness and monitors GM crops in Canada.

CBAN and other groups also sent a letter to agriculture minister Marie-Claude Bibeau and health minister Jean-Yves Duclos, asking the government to pause the decision on gene-edited crops.

“We oppose the proposals from Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency that would allow many gene-edited genetically engineered foods and seeds onto the market with no government oversight,” the letter says.

Many scientists have a different opinion. Most describe gene editing as another plant-breeding tool, which allows scientists to precisely and quickly achieve breeding goals. Some scientists put it in a larger category called NBT — New Breeding Techniques.

In a way, Health Canada already has a position on gene-edited crops.

In March 2021, it said after a “review of the current scientific knowledge regarding the use of gene-editing technologies… Health Canada concludes that the use of gene-editing technologies does not present any unique safety concerns compared to other methods of plant breeding.”

That puts Canada on the same footing as other countries, such as the United States, Japan, Australia and Argentina, which have decided that gene-edited crops are safe.

American crop science companies are already using the technology because the U.S. government provided guidance nearly four years ago.

In March 2018, U.S. agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue said gene-edited crops would be treated similarly to conventional plant breeding and would be largely exempt from regulation.

– This article was originally published at The Western Producer.

The post Federal gene editing policy expected soon appeared first on Farmtario.

“I think the opportunities are so exciting,” said Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California at Berkeley. “CRISPR is already being used to manipulate properties of plants that include crop yields, drought tolerance, pest tolerance, things that are going to have important implications around the world especially as we deal with the challenges of climate change.”

Why it matters: CRISPR technology could help agriculture meet increasing food demands and environmental challenges, but technical and regulatory hurdles must be overcome to fully benefit from the technology. 

Doudna was speaking from her home base in California at a hybrid in-person and virtual event hosted by Ag-West Bio in Saskatoon on Sept. 21. Together with French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier, Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9.

Like much biotechnology, CRISPR-Cas9 takes advantage of something nature has already worked out — in this case, how bacteria fight off viruses.

CRISPR is short for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” Those repeats are copies of small bits of genetic material from viruses. These “molecular mugshots” allow the bacteria to recognize harmful viruses and unleash Cas9, an enzyme that acts like a chemical scissors to chop up the viral DNA.

“CRISPR is an adaptive immune system found naturally in bacteria,” Doudna said. “It’s nature’s way of finding and destroying viruses before they can harm the bacteria.”

CRISPR works in any cell whether it be plant, animal or human. Doudna sees applications for agriculture falling into two buckets: discovery and application.

On the discovery side, the technology allows researchers to study single genes or genes in combination to find out what they do in any plant, not just the usual lab species such as Arabidopsis.

“It’s opening the door to fundamental research that would have been difficult or impossible to do,” she said.

As for applications, CRISPR is being harnessed to enhance nutritional value of plants. The first such product, an enhanced tomato, has just reached supermarket shelves in Japan.

CRISPR is also being used to tease out the secrets of photosynthesis in plants, a prize that could drastically increase drought resistance, water-use efficiency, and ultimately, food production.

Despite its power, CRISPR has limitations. It can edit genes, but it cannot rewrite entire genomes. It could be used to quickly detect a virus in a sick animal, but it couldn’t easily be used as a treatment because it would have to somehow be inserted into every infected cell.

This means that it’s likely a non-starter to try to treat American elms against Dutch elm disease, which is devastating urban forests across North America, at least in the short term. 

But it might be of use against the elm bark beetle that spreads the disease. CRISPR could be used to control beetle reproduction, something already being done with mosquitoes.

In a sense, Doudna said CRISPR is a way of speeding up and directing what is already happening in nature through evolution.

Apply enough drought pressure to a crop, and eventually the toughest plants will be the only ones to survive. With climate change looming, there isn’t time for this type of traditional breeding. But there is CRISPR.

“It’s a powerful way that we can now control genetics and test the function of genes as well as make changes that have very practical applications.”

Those applications of CRISPR are not limited by geography. Doudna sees opportunity to work with local teams of scientists and farmers around the world to develop local crops that are most important to them and their environments.

Despite this, like other genetic engineering techniques, CRISPR faces the wild card of public acceptance and regulatory hurdles. The European Union, for example, ruled in 2018 that gene-edited crops were genetically modified organisms, extending the de facto ban on GMOs. This decision is being reviewed.

Doudna said scientists have the responsibility to both consider the social implications of new technologies and to be as transparent with the public as possible about what they are doing, including the point that science often yields the unexpected.

She cites the current mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 as an example. The technology had been developed for decades in obscurity before finally yielding something useful. This is when the public took notice.

“The science behind that goes back a few decades, and really started with just very fundamental research,” she said. “So I think the investments that are being made now, although they may be targeted in one area, will probably have implications in agriculture that we maybe can’t see right now.”

Public outreach was top of mind when Doudna founded the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley. Regular events put scientists face-to-face with the public, and the institute provides free communications tools aimed particularly at teachers and students.

“I do think investing in education is so important to help people whose future is going to be shaped by these technologies to fully understand what they’re all about.”

This article was originally published at The Western Producer.

The post Scientist still sees CRISPR acceptance issues appeared first on Farmtario.

Using technology she developed, UGA researcher Nikki Shariat and Amy Siceloff, a first-year doctoral student in UGA’s Department of Microbiology, found that traditional culturing methods used to test livestock for problematic bacteria often miss drug-resistant strains of salmonella. This finding has implications for treating sick food animals and the people who get infected by eating contaminated meat.

The study, published in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, showed that 60 per cent of cattle fecal samples contained multiple strains of salmonella that traditional testing methods missed. 

More alarmingly, Shariat found that about one of every 10 samples tested positive for a drug-resistant strain of salmonella called Salmonella Reading. In addition to being antibiotic resistant, Salmonella Reading can cause severe illness in people.

Developed by Shariat in 2015, CRISPR-SeroSeq enables researchers to analyze all types of salmonella present in a given sample. Traditional methods only examine one or two colonies of bacteria, potentially missing some strains of salmonella altogether. 

Shariat’s technology identifies molecular signatures in salmonella’s CRISPR regions, a specialized part of the bacteria’s DNA. It also helps researchers identify which strains of the bacteria are most abundant.

In the current study, Shariat and colleagues found multiple salmonella strains in cattle feces before the animals were treated with the antibiotic tetracycline. After treatment, several of the dominant salmonella strains in the sample were wiped out, allowing Salmonella Reading to flourish.

Traditional culturing methods missed the antibiotic-resistant strain in the original samples. It was only once the antibiotic eliminated the more abundant strains that conventional methods were able to detect Salmonella Reading.

“This suggests that traditional tests have underestimated the amount of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the past,” said Shariat, an assistant professor of population health in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

But CRISPR-SeroSeq is a much more sensitive tool. It flagged the Salmonella Reading before antibiotic treatment.

“We need to know the antimicrobial resistance profiles of the bacteria that are present in animals,” Shariat said. “That knowledge could make us change our choice of the type of antibiotic we use to treat ill animals. It can also help us select the best antibiotic for people who get sick from eating contaminated meat.

“The problem is, you have hundreds of salmonella colonies in a given sample, but you only pick one or two of them to test,” Shariat said. 

“It becomes a numbers game where researchers only pick the most abundant ones, and this means that they underestimate the different types of salmonella that are present.”

The post New tests find more resistant bacteria appeared first on Farmtario.

That’s because Health Canada has declared that gene-editing technology is safe.

Health Canada recently proposed new rules to oversee plant breeding innovation, including gene editing.

Why it matters: Canada has lagged other countries in its regulations surrounding gene editing, which could have put Canadian farmers and researchers behind those in other countries.

Within the proposed guidelines released March 25, federal scientists say that gene editing is just as safe as conventional plant breeding.

“Through a review of the current scientific knowledge regarding the use of gene-editing technologies… Health Canada concludes that the use of gene-editing technologies does not present any unique safety concerns compared to other methods of plant breeding.”

That statement is positive news for plant breeders, crop science companies and Canadian farmers, says Erin Gowriluk, Grain Growers of Canada executive director.

It puts Canadian growers on a level playing field with producers in other grain-exporting nations, like Australia, Argentina and the United States. Those nations have already ruled that gene editing will be treated the same as conventional plant breeding.

“We want to ensure that Canadian farmers have access to the same technologies as their counterparts do in other jurisdictions,” Gowriluk said.

Genome editing, or gene editing, is changing the genetic code of a plant with technology like CRISPR-Cas9 — a tool used to cut sections of DNA. Scientists from California and France won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of CRISPR.

Gene editing is often described as adding, removing, or altering genetic sequences at precise locations in the genetic code.

It’s different from transgenic plant technology, where DNA from another species (like a bacteria) is inserted to achieve a desired trait.

Supporters of gene-edited crops, including many plant breeders, believe it could revolutionize crop development. It will allow scientists to precisely change a plant’s DNA to achieved desired traits, such as improved disease resistance or healthier grains.

As an example, a Minnesota firm has used gene editing to design a soybean that produces high-oleic oil. The company produced four million bushels of the crop in the U.S. last year.

Critics of gene editing, including the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, say the technology is imprecise and can have unexpected consequences.

Health Canada, in its proposed guidelines, said conventional plant breeding also produces “off-target” changes in DNA, so it’s not unique to gene editing.

“Genetic variations that occur because of conventional breeding practices… can also introduce unintended characteristics,” Health Canada said. “Should off-target edits be present in a gene-edited plant, plant developers are able to remove them in most crops using breeding and selection, and/or backcrossing.”

Health Canada’s proposed decision provides more certainty for plant breeders and crop science companies, said Ian Affleck, vice-president of plant biotechnology with CropLife Canada.

CropLife and other groups have warned that major crop innovation could move outside of Canada because of outdated plant-breeding regulations.

As an example, Cibus, a California company, has used gene editing to design canola that’s resistant to sclerotinia, a major disease for Canadian growers.

Now that Health Canada has announced its decision, it’s hoped that companies will invest in research and development in Canada.

“That’s the hope,” Gowriluk said. “It ensures they don’t overlook the Canadian market… when you think about where you want to bring some of these new tools and technologies.”

Health Canada’s public consultation on plant breeding rules began March 25 and concludes May 24. Grain Growers of Canada is asking farmers to get involved and share their thoughts on gene-edited crops.

“Submit a letter,” Gowriluk said. “(Write) specifically about what it means to you, as a farmer.”

This article was originally published at The Western Producer.

The post Health Canada declares gene editing safe appeared first on Farmtario.

Powerful DNA-editing techniques such as CRISPR can speed up that process. 

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor David Jackson and his postdoctoral fellow Lei Liu collaborated with University of Massachusetts Amherst Associate Professor Madelaine Bartlett to use this highly specific technique to tinker with corn kernel numbers. Jackson’s lab is one of the first to apply CRISPR to corn’s very complex genome.

DNA is divided into two parts: the gene and the regulatory regions that promote or suppress gene activity. 

“A lot of people were using CRISPR in a very simple sense just to disrupt genes completely, to knock out the gene,” says Jackson. “But we came up with this new idea to CRISPR the promoter regions that turn the gene on. And that is what gives this very interesting result where we can get the variation in traits that we need in agriculture.”

Jackson wanted to increase the number of kernels per cob. The corn kernel development pathway includes genes that promote stem cell growth and differentiation into distinct plant organs. 

Jackson and Liu focused on CLEs, a family of genes that act as a brake to stop stem cell growth. But the corn genome is complex. The CLE family contains almost 50 related genes, with promoter regions that vary from gene to gene. What parts are most important for kernel production? 

“So we basically randomly targeted the promoter region: we have no idea which part of the promoter is important,” says Liu. “So probably the next step, we will focus more on figuring out which part of the promoter is critical. And, then we probably will make our promoter CRISPR more efficient. We can get a better allele which can produce more grain yield or ear size.”

Cereal crops like corn are a major source of food for humans and feed for livestock. Jackson and Liu hope their new CRISPR strategy will increase crop yield per acre and make agriculture more sustainable.

The post Tweaking corn kernels with CRISPR appeared first on Farmtario.

The first of the transgenic chicks will be hatched later this year at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said Wendy Barclay, a professor of virology at Imperial College London who is co-leading the project.

The birds’ DNA has been altered using a new gene editing technology known as CRISPR. In this case the “edits” are to remove parts of a protein on which the flu virus normally depends, making the chickens totally flu-resistant.

The idea is to generate poultry that cannot get flu and would form a “buffer between wild birds and humans,” Barclay said.

Global health and infectious disease specialists cite the threat of a human flu pandemic as one of their biggest concerns.

The death toll in the last flu pandemic in 2009-10 — caused by the H1N1 strain and considered to be relatively mild — was around half a million people worldwide. The historic 1918 Spanish flu killed around 50 million people.

The greatest fear now is that a deadly strain could jump from wild birds via poultry into humans, and then mutate into a pandemic airborne form that can pass easily between people.

“If we could prevent influenza virus crossing from wild birds into chickens, we would stop the next pandemic at source,” said Barclay.

In research published in 2016 in the journal Nature, Barclay’s team found that a gene present in chickens called ANP32 encodes a protein that all flu viruses depend on to infect a host. Laboratory tests of cells engineered to lack the gene showed they cannot be infected with flu.

Teaming up scientists at the Roslin, Barclay said the plan is to use CRISPR to edit the chicks’ DNA so that only one part of the key protein is changed, leaving the rest of the bird exactly the same, genetically, as it was before.

“We have identified the smallest change that will stop the virus in its tracks,” she said.

Roslin Institute scientists gained fame in 1996 as creators of “Dolly the sheep,” the world’s first cloned animal. They have also created gene-edited pigs to make them resistant to a virus.

Barclay said one of the biggest hurdles to this approach would be poultry producers’ concerns about public acceptance. “People eat food from farmed animals that have been altered by decades of traditional breeding,” she said. “But they might be nervous about eating gene-edited food.”

— Kate Kelland is a Reuters health and science correspondent based in London.

The post Gene-edited chickens planned in bid to halt next pandemic appeared first on Farmtario.

Or, more accurately, the Government of Canada believes gene edited crops can help farmers produce “safe and affordable food, feed, fibres, and energy in the 21st century.”

The quote comes from a statement released in early November and was delivered during a World Trade Organization meeting.

Why it matters: Gene editing could be a less controversial and more efficient way of increasing crop productivity, but there are issues with approvals, especially in Europe, which could delay adoption of the technology.

The United States and 12 other nations — Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Jordan, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Vietnam — issued a joint statement on agricultural applications of precision biotechnology.

“Agricultural innovation has played an essential role in increasing yields and productivity in support of growing, prosperous civilizations,” the opening line of the statement says.

“Innovations in precision biotechnology, such as gene editing, have brought the promise of major improvements in terms of the ease and precision of introducing desirable traits into agricultural organisms, as compared to other breeding methods.”

Gene editing, using a technique called CRISPR, has been touted for several years as the next big thing in plant science. It allows researchers to precisely delete or insert genes in a plant’s DNA.

A news release announcing a licensing agreement with a gene editing company, Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) described the technique as the “biological equivalent to the ‘search and replace’ function in computer word processors.”

“Monsanto believes gene editing technologies have the potential to improve a number of crops within our current research portfolio, which includes corn, cotton, soybeans, canola, wheat and fruits and vegetable crops,” said Camille Scott, who does scientific communications for the company.

In the WTO statement, the 13 countries urged other nations to adopt consistent and reliable rules for gene edited crops.

“Due consideration should be exercised by governments to avoid arbitrary and unjustifiable distinctions between end products (crop traits) derived from precision biotechnology and similar end products, obtained through other production methods.”

That’s a wordy way of saying: make decisions based on facts and science, not feelings.

The European Union wasn’t mentioned in the two-page statement, but it clearly was a rebuke of European policies on biotechnology.

This summer, Europe’s highest court ruled that gene edited crops should be regulated the same way as genetically modified plants.

Many academics and biotech associations condemned the court’s decision.

Most experts believe that gene editing is a precise form of mutagenesis, in which plant breeders use chemicals to create random mutations that generate new and useful plant traits.

Most regulators, such as Health Canada, treat mutagenesis as conventional plant breeding, so the regulatory and approval costs are much lower than genetically modified crops.

Biotech firms believe gene editing should be treated the same as mutagenesis, meaning it should be classified as a modern form of conventional plant breeding.

The American Seed Trade Association did mention Europe in a news release, saying the regulation of gene editing should be based on science.

“The American seed industry is founded on innovation, and plant scientists have been successfully developing and improving crop varieties for hundreds of years,” said ASTA president Andrew LaVigne.

“In light of the recent disappointing decision by the European Court of Justice, efforts such as this international statement are more important than ever in working toward the goal of global alignment on policies around agricultural innovation.”

Canada is not bound by the words in the joint statement. The federal government can take a different approach on gene editing and new plant breeding methods if it chooses.

The post Canada joins group supporting gene editing appeared first on Farmtario.

The biotech industry had argued that much of mutagenesis, or gene editing, is effectively little different to the mutagenesis that occurs naturally or is induced by radiation — a standard plant breeding method since the 1950s — but the court disagreed.

“Organisms obtained by mutagenesis are GMOs and are, in principle, subject to the obligations laid down by the GMO Directive,” the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) said in a statement.

“The Court of Justice takes the view, first of all, that organisms obtained by mutagenesis are GMOs within the meaning of the GMO Directive, in so far as the techniques and methods of mutagenesis alter the genetic material of an organism in a way that does not occur naturally,” it added.

The ruling by the ECJ goes against the opinion of the court’s advocate general, who argued in January that the new techniques should be allowed.

Gene editing has the potential to make hardier and more nutritious crops — as well as offering drug companies new ways to fight human disease.

German chemical industry association VCI, which represents companies such as Bayer, BASF and Merck, said the court’s ruling was “backward looking and hostile to progress.”

European biotech association EuropaBio said the ruling failed to provide regulatory clarity.

“Public confidence and science-based decision-making are both important for ensuring that genome editing can deliver needed solutions,” EuropaBio secretary general John Brennan said.

Environmentalists, anti-GM groups and farmers concerned about the potential environmental and health impacts of all genetically engineered products said allowing gene editing would usher in a new era of “GMO 2.0” via the backdoor.

“We welcome this landmark ruling which defeats the biotech industry’s latest attempt to push unwanted genetically-modified products onto our fields and plates,” Mute Schimpf, a campaigner for environmental group Friends of the Earth said in a statement.

The European Union has long restricted the use of GMOs widely adopted around the world, but there was legal uncertainty as to whether modern gene editing of crops should fall under the same rules.

While older GMO technology typically adds new DNA to a crop or animal, gene editing can swiftly cause a mutation by changing a few pieces of DNA code, such as with the CRISPR/Cas9 tool, a type of molecular scissor technology that can be used to edit DNA.

Earlier this month, scientists studying the effects of CRISPR/Cas9 said it could cause unexpected genetic damage which could lead to dangerous changes in some cells.

A group of French agricultural associations brought the case to the ECJ, saying plant varieties obtained via mutagenesis should not be exempt from GMO rules under French law.

The court added that an exception could be made for techniques that have been used conventionally and have a long safety record.

— Robert-Jan Bartunek is a Reuters correspondent in Brussels.

The post GMO rules cover plant gene editing technique, top EU court says appeared first on Farmtario.