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Crispr’d Food, Coming Soon To A Supermarket Near You
- gravelc 9y agoThe reason why these kinds of food will not be regulated is fairly simple; unlike previous GMOs, there is no way to tell them apart from 'naturally' bred counterparts. A regulatory regime would have to solely rely on the developer's honesty, which isn't really viable.
- jonny_eh 9y agoHow is the resulting product different from other GMOs?
- folli 9y agoUsing more traditional techniques, you insert a selection marker (e.g. an antibiotic resistance) which helps you selecting clones where the modification successfully took place (all the clones which do not have the antibiotic resistance will die after applying the antibiotic, leaving only clones where the modification was successful). In a next step this marker is usually removed, but this still leaves some "scars" (e.g. so called "FRT scars", a short DNA sequence), that could theoretically be used to prove that modifications were made. Because CRISPR-Cas9 is very efficient, these steps are not needed anymore, so in theory there are no artifacts which would hint that any "non-natural" modifications would have occurred.
- inciampati 9y agoIt's efficient but not so precise and efficient that the modifications can't be seen as different that the background genome.
- gravelc 9y agoThat isn't really correct. If you delete a section of DNA, then the difference is that piece of DNA has been excised. Given that excision (or duplication) can occur naturally, there is no way of telling whether the change is due to CRISPR or not. It doesn't leave tell-tale signs. If there were a strict regulatory regime, there's simply no way of enforcing compliance. Of course it's simple when you put in something that's obviously exogenous - cheap genome sequencing will pick it up, hence why that will be regulated. Anything else, and you're relying on an honesty system.
- folli 9y agoThe precision will undoubtedly be increased. Remember that the system has been discovered approx. 10 years ago and the idea to use it for genome modifications (especially Cas9 from Streptococcus pyogenes) is only a couple of years old.
- mirimir 9y agoBecause they wouldn't be adding genes from other species.
- sethbannon 9y agoBasically what this guidance says is that if you're CRISPR'ing food that could have been created through traditional cross breeding, then it's auto-approved and falls under the USDA regulatory sphere. If you're creating food that could not be created through traditional cross breeding, it needs approval and falls under the FDA's regulatory sphere. Pretty reasonable if you ask me.
- cma 9y agoWhile reasonable, a filename typo couldn't result in inserting genes from the chickenpox genome into a potato with traditional cross breeding, whereas it could with CRISPR (at least at some point with digitally specified synthesis like in the Venter artificial cell). By having an approval/verification step they could avoid accidents (not that chickenpox potato is a realistic scenario or threat).
- folli 9y agoResequencing of the modified genome is SOP, how else would you check that the right gene has been inserted/deleted in the right locus in the right way?
- candiodari 9y agoSimple: let it grow. If it turns into purple zombies and eats the town (or otherwise shows unexpected gene expression), you failed. A variation on this is to also have it do an easy to check change, like various forms of fluorescence, then check for the easy to check ones and assume that if that one happened, the important one happened too.
- malnourish 9y agoNot all genes are expressed in the phenotype.
- candiodari 9y ago
- labster 9y agoFood so good, it'll rewrite your taste buds!
- gravelc 9y agoImagine what food from atomic gardens would do! I suspect that many consumers would be surprised that atomic gardens and the like were and are a thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening). New highly directed techniques like CRISPR are a boon to everyone, breeder and consumer alike. Random mutagenesis, whether it be naturally occurring or induced chemically/radioactively, has so much more scope for unintended consequences.
- campground 9y agoIt's like simulated annealing over the gene space.
- ianai 9y agoWell that is amazing.
- bitwize 9y agoNow my refrigerator will need a CRISPR drawer...
- spraak 9y agoThe new regulations would be that there is no reporting required if the modifications could have occurred naturally--but who is responsible for that determination?
- folli 9y agoDeletion of a Gene -> Very high likelihood of occurring naturally Duplication of a Gene -> Very high likelihood of occurring naturally Insertion of a Gene from same species (e.g. from another strain) -> High likelihood of occurring naturally Insertion of a Gene from an unrelated species -> Low likelihood of occurring naturally
- flyGuyOnTheSly 9y agoMy thoughts exactly. This seems like a very slippery slope. Who can say for sure that editing the genome of a plant in a certain way could mimic selective breeding?
- zaarn 9y agoThat's actually pretty easy to tell. Simply deleting or duplicating genes is entirely natural. Any CRISPR mutation achieved through merely duplicating or deleting sequences is therefore also achievable through selective breeding. Transferring genes from one strain of a species to another while the two species can interbreed is also very clearly natural. The above but if the interbreeding process requires artificial help would be more of a slippery slope but in theory you could still do selective breeding in that case. Transferring a gene from a potato to a strawberry would not be achievable by selectively breeding the two (purely because those two can't interbreed at all in this example).
- spraak 9y agoI really think technology like this is energy misapplied or wasted. It's overly zoomed in on individual plant's performance, where actually addressing human created problems in ecosystems and the environment on a whole seems much more important. It's like trying to harden the security on your house while living in a dangerous neighborhood instead of just moving somewhere else.
- DubiousPusher 9y agoExcept that we can't "move somewhere else." Or so least no one has provided a valid plan for such a "move". We have massively increased yields and cultivated nearly all the best land just to keep pace with the human population boom. By all accounts, that boom will continue for some time until it peaks and the only viable way to feed that many people is to increase yield density. If we can grow that density even faster than the pace of population growth we may even be able to turn back some of that land and mitigate the vast habitat destruction we've perpetrated on the biosphere. IMO, supporting GMOs is one of the most environmentally concious things you can do.
- craftyguy 9y ago> By all accounts, that boom will continue for some time until it peaks and the only viable way to feed that many people is to increase yield density. We could also work to reduce the peak. You know, fight the illness, not the symptoms?
- adsfqwop 9y agoAs far as I know there is no scientific certainty that CRISPR does not produce off-target mutations. Therefore to use the word "indistinguishable" here seems quite dishonest. Because of this fact I get the feeling like we are being sold a marketing trick. If the gene editing procedure can produce off-target mutations, then it is not indistinguishable, and to say otherwise is misleading. "God’s red pencil? CRISPR and the three myths of precise genome editing": http://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/16900-god-s-red-pencil-crispr-and-the-three-myths-of-precise-genome-editing http://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/16900-god-s-red-penci...
- gravelc 9y agoIf you could write software that could distinguish off-target CRISPR mutations from sequencing data, you'd have quite a valuable tool. Shouldn't be too difficult if indistinguishablity is a declared myth.
- amelius 9y agoThat's pretty easy, because exact matching is easy. Just perform sequencing on the new genome, and map the sequences back to the original genome (with edits). If you can't find an exact match, you know something is wrong. You can also look at the statistics: if some sequences are more prevalent than they should be, you know something is wrong.
- folli 9y agoAnd how would you differentiate from classical breeding over X decades?
- gravelc 9y agoSequencing has errors - some in the PCR stage so not corrected by greater read depth for short reads (long reads are much more error prone). Genomes are dynamic - they change. You are looking at the progeny or regenerated plant, not the original plant. Exact matching will not get you far.
- phkahler 9y agoSerious question: Won't these foods contain CRISPR itself? Isn't that a potential hazard? Here, eat some gene editing scissors... Don't worry, the instructions for what to modify will break down after the editing mechanism itself. We promise.
- atomical 9y agoIsn't all horizontal gene transfer a hazard? Or rather, no hazard at all?
- folli 9y agoNo, you can transfect the cells directly with Cas9 (the enzyme) and guide RNA, so you don't need to integrate the Cas9 gene into the genome, i.e. it won't be replicated and will vanish after cell division.
- maxerickson 9y agoNo, they won't contain CRISPR machinery. CRISPR will be used to create new lines of seed, not to alter plants that are headed for the grocer. The economics of editing plants that are being grown for food are miserable compared to editing plants that are being grown for seed. Even for something like apples where the fruit producing part of the tree is cloned, it will be years and multiple cuttings of clones between the application of any edits and the eventual harvest of fruit that contain the altered genes.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y agoThat's simply not how CRISPR-Cas9 works. Furthermore, detecting novel genetic sequence in an organism is trivial to detect with blotting or PCR amplification and sequencing. You could do this as a fun exercise for undergrads, or even high-school students.