CRISPR-Edited Food Is Coming to Our Plates And It Wont Be Labelled as GMO

[progressoid]

The next gene-edited food you eat probably won’t be a GMO (genetically modified organism) – at least not in the conventional sense of the term

Instead, it will probably have been made using CRISPR, a new technique that lets scientists precisely tweak the DNA of crops to give it enhanced flavour, a longer shelf-life, or the ability to survive severe drought. A recent decision from the US Department of Agriculture has given a pass for crops made using CRISPR to avoid the stern and lengthy rules that are traditionally imposed on foods made using any kind of biotechnology, such as GMOs. In a public update released last week, US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said that the USDA had no plans to regulate plants “that could otherwise have been developed through traditional breeding techniques.”

...

To make a CRISPR crop, scientists can make a meticulous edit right down to a single letter from a crop’s genome – the full set of genetic material composed of nucleotides denoted by the letters A, G, C, and T.

...

Most importantly, however, is the work that scientists are doing on the potential applications of CRISPR to help feed a burgeoning population on a planet with less and less farmable land. In China, researchers are experimenting with using the technique to create cows that are better protected from tuberculosis, a chronic bacterial disease that can spread to humans and has fuelled the scourge of antibiotic resistance. Swedish scientist Stefan Jansson, a plant researcher at Umea University, has been experimenting with CRISPR to make vegetables that are better protected from pests.


Read more at: https://sciencedoesntcare.com/biology/crispr-edited-food-is-coming-to-our-plates-and-it-won039t-be-labelled-as-gmo

Good

[Loki Liesmith]

1. Good

[trotsky]

2. Our population growth continues.

Whatever helps us feed ourselves, particularly in an era of climate change, is going to help us survive.

[mahina]

3. I avoid GMO because I dont like eating roundup. I wouldnt avoid this.

Not that I could choose one and not the other.

The big Ag companies here are soaking our farm soil in f-ing roundup as they grow gmo seeds for corn. It’s running off into our ocean and killing our fish. They get heaps of state tax credits because they are doing agriculture but they don’t make any food for Hawaii, just corn seed they ship off. I loathe them. What they have done to Molokai and Kauai they should be imprisoned for.

Anyway. This CRISPR gmo seems positive to me from the tiny info I now have.

[NickB79]

6. CRISPR is being used to create herbicide-resistant crops

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877117317300650

Don't be surprised to see new CRISPR-created crops that are Roundup-Ready in the near future, yet still labelled non-GMO in the store.

[mahina]

7. Oh crap. Thanks.

[DetlefK]

4. I have read, they want to develop plants that use a different kind of photosynthesis.

Plants originally stole photosynthesis from cynobacteria via lateral gene-transfer, billions of years ago. (Cyanobacteria are sometimes mislabeled as algae, but they are not plants.) But while the cyanobacteria have evolved better and better photosynthesis, plants are still stuck with the original one.

The plan is to take the advanced photosynthesis of contemporary cyanobacteria and to implant it into a plant. This would create a new breed of super-plants that can grow and multiply faster than ordinary plants.

Risks:
- If such a super-plant escapes into the wild, it will have an evolutionary edge over ordinary plants. If a plant grows twice as fast as another plant, that can have major implications over time.
- Such a plant would not be green. Scientists are experimenting with genes that would lead to orange or blue plants. Would you, as a consumer, eat orange or blue lettuce?

[GeorgeHayduke]

8. I'd like to read

The source of this information. Journal, first author, and publication date?

[DetlefK]

9. Don't remember. Read it in an article a few years ago.

But I found this.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/28/8529

Further, if the chlorophyll a in photosystem II (PSII) were replaced by chlorophyll d (as occurs in the cyanobacterium Acaryochloris marina, which uses light up to 730 nm) and if the reduced quinone produced by this photosystem delivered electrons directly to a NADH dehydrogenase operating “backwards” as it does in purple bacteria (using PMF to drive the production of NADPH from reduced quinone), one can envision the system of Fig. 1B. A photosynthetic membrane having this arrangement of energy-transducing complexes would have more than twice the energetic efficiency of current oxygenic photosynthesis

[DetlefK]

10. Found something.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3970417/

Indeed, exhaustive analysis reveals a mosaic of prokaryotic signals from right across the diversity of bacteria in the plant genome, probably introgressed by the cyanobacterial endosymbiont after it had experienced numerous lateral gene transfers (Dagan et al. 2013).

Approximately 2 billion years after cyanobacteria-like organisms had invented photosynthesis, they entered into an endosymbiotic partnership with a eukaryotic host and evolved into plastids creating an autotrophic line of nucleus-containing cells that were powered by light. The host and symbiont are now intimately integrated, morphologically, genetically, and metabolically. Nevertheless, the endosymbionts remain partially autonomous, still encoding and expressing a small residue of genes that act in concert with a wide range of components—some transferred to the host by endosymbiotic gene transfer, plus many invented by the host—that enhance the partnership to power an extraordinary amalgam, the descendants of which underpin life on earth.

Okay... I have still not proven my claim that the plant-photosynthesis failed to evolve while the cyanobacteria-photosynthesis did.

[krispos42]

5. I'm really getting pissed I missed the lecture on CRISPR...

...the local Humanists group held a few months ago.