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As ethicists discuss applications of the Crispr blockbuster gene editing tool in healthcare, an inventor of the tool thinks it has a more immediate application: improve our diet.
"I think in the next five years, the agricultural sector will have a profound impact on the effects of Crispr on people's daily lives," said Jennifer Doudna, a geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley, who put to day Crispr in his first experiments on bacteria in 2012, said Business Insider.
Crispr has dozens of potential uses, from treating diseases such as sickle cell disease to certain forms of hereditary blindness. The tool recently made headlines when a scientist in China would have used to change the DNA of a pair of twins.
Then there are the practical applications of Crispr – the kind of things that one could expect to see in places such as grocery stores and farmers' fields a decade ago, according to Doudna .
Relatively inexpensive and easy to use, Crispr is entering every field, from vegetables to laboratory meat.
The attractiveness of Crispr for food is simple: it is cheaper and easier than traditional breeding methods, including those currently used for the production of genetically modified crops (also called GMOs). It is also much more accurate. Where traditional reproduction methods jostle the genome of a culture with a blunt blade, tools such as Crispr slice and reshape with a precision comparable to that of a scalpel.
You want a mushroom that does not brown? A corn crop that produces more food at the acre? Both already exist, even though they are not yet in the plates of the consumers. What about a strawberry with a longer shelf life or tomatoes that stay better on the vines?
"I think all of these things happen pretty quickly," Doudna said.
Read more: The 10 people who transform health
Work on Crispr® products has been going on for about five years, but it's only recently that US regulators have created a viable path for Crispr® products to be marketed.
In 2016, Penn State researchers used Crispr to make mushrooms that do not brown. Last spring, the pairwise gene editing start-up received $ 125 million from agricultural giant Monsanto to work on Crispr® products with the goal of getting them to grocery stores here. 10 years. A month later, Stefan Jansson, head of the plant physiology department at the Swedish University of Umea, grew up and ate the world's first crispy cabbage.
More recently, several start-up companies in Silicon Valley have experimented with the use of Crispr to produce lab-grown meat.
Read more: Start-ups backed by celebrities such as Bill Gates use Crispr to make meat without farms
Memphis Meats, a startup supported by personalities such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson, who created real chicken strips and meatball prototypes from animal cells (without killing any animals), uses this tool. The same goes for New Age Meats, another San Francisco-based start-up that aims to create real meat without being slaughtered.
US regulators will likely allow crops Crispr to be marketed
Last spring, the US Department of Agriculture issued a new crop decision that exempts many Crispr-modified crops from the monitoring that accompanies traditional GMOs. As long as the modified DNA of these crops could also have been created using traditional breeding techniques, Crispr® products are not subject to these additional regulatory steps, according to L & # 39; agency.
"With this approach, the USDA seeks to enable innovation where there is no risk," said Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, in a statement. communicated. Genome editing tools such as Crispr, he added, "will help farmers do what we aspire to do at the USDA: act right and feed everyone."
Read more: Controversial technology could save us from hunger – if we leave it
Although many researchers and scientists have supported this decision, many anti-GMO activists have not been satisfied.
Despite the setback, Doudna thinks that crisper food could help dispel some of the fear of GMOs and raise awareness about the role of science in agriculture.
"I hope this will bring this discussion into an area where we can discuss it in a logical way," she said. "Is not it better to have a technology that allows precise manipulation of the genome of a plant, rather than relying on random modifications?"
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