Articles

Released On: 06 Sep 2021Available for 29 days

Growing genetically edited crops has moved another step closer to being a reality in England with a new report for the government on how new regulations could work. The Regulatory Horizon Council, an independent committee which advises government, suggests a ‘light touch’ approach which would treat GE crops more like conventionally grown ones and so reduce the time and cost of getting permission for new products. Anti GM campaigners say the report is disappointing and misrepresentative. For centuries livestock farmers have been fine tuning breeding. In the past it was about finding the tastiest meat or the best fleeces. Now, modern breeding methods can help reduce the risk of disease, boost profits and even help cut the carbon footprint of farming. This week we’re all about animal breeding and to kick us off we hear from Professor Mike Coffey, Leader of Animal Breeding and Genomics at SRUC, Scotland’s Rural College.

Commission reportedly aims to exempt some new GMOs from safety regulations within four years and change regulation for all new GMOs within 10 years

In April this year the European Commission's health division DG SANTE published a "working document" in which it announced that the EU's GMO regulations are "not fit for purpose". The Commission made suggestions that could lead to crop plants produced using experimental new GM techniques such as gene editing being exempted from the requirements of the regulation. This could mean that these crop plants would not be subjected to safety checks, GMO labelling, or traceability and monitoring requirements.

Enabled by new genetic engineering techniques such as CRISPR/Cas9, so-called gene drives have been developed in recent years that enable humans to spread new genes throughout the genome of wild animal populations. Gene drives force the inheritance of newly introduced genes to be inherited by all offspring, even if this lowers the survival chances of the affected species. In the most extreme case, gene drive technology could drive an entire species to extinction or replace wild populations with genetically modified organisms.

2021: Testbiotech report IUCN and Synthtetic Biology

Biotechnology, genetic engineering and our responsibility for nature

Gentechnik und unser Umgang mit der Natur

Synthetic biology and synthetic genome technologies

Synthetische Biologie & Synthetische Gentechnik

Action brief

What’s happening?

Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA)

are proposing new “regulatory guidance” which would exempt many new genetically engineered foods and seeds (genetically modified organisms or GMOs) from government safety assessments. Instead, product developers themselves would assess food and environmental safety, with no government oversight. These exemptions would apply to many new genetically engineered foods and seeds that have no foreign DNA (likely produced by gene editing techniques).

Wheat for people "who are unable to use a toaster properly" will be planted in open field

The UK Government has given Rothamsted Research consent to plant highly experimental GM wheat in an open field near St Albans.

GM Freeze, which led the opposition to the trial, joined by GMWatch and other organisations, commented in an email to supporters, "Apparently developed for those who are unable to use a toaster properly, the 'low acrylamide' wheat has altered DNA that reduces the production of a chemical that may cause cancer if consumed in large quantities, but is associated with burnt toast rather than sensibly prepared wheat products. Even then, Cancer Research UK [CRUK] says that 'eating burnt food does not cause cancer'."

Abstract

Evolution of resistance by pests can reduce the benefits of crops genetically engineered to produce insecticidal proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Because of the widespread resistance of Helicoverpa zea to crystalline (Cry) Bt toxins in the United States, the vegetative insecticidal protein Vip3Aa is the only Bt toxin produced by Bt corn and cotton that remains effective against some populations of this polyphagous lepidopteran pest. Here we evaluated H. zea resistance to Vip3Aa using diet bioassays to test 42,218 larvae from three lab strains and 71 strains derived from the field during 2016 to 2020 in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas.

Chandigarh: Cotton crop in several districts of Haryana and Punjab has been hit by pink bollworm, one of the most destructive pests, this season. Among the districts affected by the pink bollworm are Sirsa, Fatehabad, Hisar, Mahendragarh and Jind of Haryana and Bathinda and Mansa of Punjab. Ashish Mehta, a cotton farmer from Mandi Dabwali in Sirsa said almost 30 to 40 per cent of the farmers' crop has been damaged due to the pest in his area. Before Bt cotton was introduced in the region around 2005, farmers used to suffer heavy losses due to frequent attacks of American bollworm on their cotton crop. However, the Bt cotton, or Bollgard as it is called, was considered resistant to pests. But the infestation now has left the farmers in distress, as they feel they might have to suffer the pest attacks every year as it occurred prior to 2005. According to experts, the female moth of pink bollworm lays eggs in a cotton boll, and when the larvae emerge from the eggs, they inflict damage through feeding. They chew through the cotton lint to feed on the seeds. Since cotton is used for both fiber and seed oil, the damage is twofold, tell the experts. "Since the eggs and larvae are inside the flower, the farmers are unable to even know about the pest attack till the cotton fruits open up. By then it is already too late," said Mehta.

REVIEW OF

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

The Code Breaker contains 481 pages of Oscar-level cinematic prose, providing a whistle-stop tour of how Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a large supporting cast discovered and developed the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR—an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. These repeating DNA features were found to be part of the defense system that bacteria have evolved over their billions of years of warfare with viruses. Enzymes associated with CRISPR sequences cut up attacking viral DNA and insert a section of it into the bacteria’s own genome in order to recognize it in the future. Doudna and her colleagues’ innovation was to configure and use this viral “mugshot” system to target and insert specific genetic sequences, creating a flexible DNA cut-and-paste tool.

Doreen Stabinsky

Third World Network Penang, Malaysia

“NATURE-BASED solutions” (NbS)1 is a contested term. Academics write long peer-reviewed articles laying out criteria by which so-called NbS might be evaluated,2 whilst oil majors create new “nature-based solutions” business units unaligned with the basic elements of the definitional crite- ria being set out by the academics.3 At the end of the day, NbS means what the powerful actors using it to green their images want it to mean.

The phrase “nature-based solutions” says everything and nothing at the same time. Its proponents argue that such a broadly encompassing term provides opportunities to highlight a whole range of beneficial, biodiversity-protecting practices at the same time, and that packaging all these together in this term might help mobilize protection from a range of drivers of biodiversity and ecosystem loss by calling attention to the myriad ways in which societies benefit from “nature”.