Genetics tech could lead to more crops
‘Domestication’ genes
BOISE, Idaho, Aug 7, (Agencies): A multinational agricultural company based in Idaho has acquired gene editing licensing rights that could one day be used to help farmers produce more crops and make grocery store offerings such as strawberries, potatoes and avocados stay fresher longer.
J.R. Simplot Company on Monday announced the agreement with DowDuPont Inc and the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, developers of the nascent gene editing technology. Simplot is the first agricultural company to receive such a license.
“We think this is a transformative technology — it’s very powerful,” said Issi Rozen, chief business officer of the Broad Institute. “We’re delighted that Simplot is the first one to take advantage of the licensing.”
There is no evidence that genetically modified organisms, known as GMOs, are unsafe to eat, but changing the genetic code of foods presents an ethical issue for some. For example McDonald’s had declined to use Simplot’s genetically engineered potatoes for its French fries.
The food industry has also faced pressure from retailers as consumer awareness of genetically modified foods has increased.
J.R. Simplot officials declined to say how much the company paid for the licensing rights acquired through a process intended to prevent the technology from being used unethically. The technology allows scientists to make precise changes to the genome of living organisms and has wide-ranging applications for improving plant food production and quality.
Produced
“The issues are about getting the right kind of food produced in the right kind of way,” said Neal Gutterson, chief technology officer at Corteva Agriscience, DowDuPont’s agriculture division. “It’s important to be able to produce enough food for the nine to 10 billion people who will be on the planet in 30 years.”
The gene editing technology is called CRISPRCas9, the first part an acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” The technology speeds up the traditional process of breeding generation after generation of plants to get a certain desirable trait, saving years in developing new varieties that are as safe as traditionally developed varieties, scientists say.
Essentially, if an organism’s genome is made analogous to a large manuscript, CRISPR-Cas9 allows scientists to edit specific words in the manuscript using a “search and replace” function. One of the remaining challenges, scientists say, is getting the complete genome for particular food crops. Or, to use the analogy, to not only have the complete manuscript but to have it translated so scientists know where to make the edits.
The CRISPR-Cas9 technology is so new that in March the US Department of Agriculture, which regulates how food is produced, issued a statement clarifying its oversight of foods produced with gene editing. “Under its biotechnology regulations, USDA does not regulate or have any plans to regulate plants that could otherwise have been developed through traditional breeding techniques,” the agency said.
Simplot markets products in more than 40 countries, and ithas major operations in the United States, China, Canada, Australia and Mexico. The company, which is a top producer of avocados grown in Mexico and sold in the US, is perhaps best known for potatoes.
A six-decade breeding experiment with foxes designed to shed light on how wolves became dogs has led to the discovery of genes that favour tame or aggressive behaviour, scientists said Monday.
Comparing the sequenced genomes of foxes selected across 50 generations for their friendliness towards people with another group bred for hostility uncovered dozens of telltale differences, including one gene in particular, they reported in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
“We were able to show that a specific gene” — known as SorCS1 — “does have an effect on behaviour, making foxes more tame,” lead author Anna Kukekova, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, told AFP.
“That’s a big result — it’s hard to make that connection,” she said. The findings are also relevant to human behaviour. Some of the genetic regions identified, for example, correspond to autism and bipolar disorders, while others are associated with William-Beuren syndrome, which causes pathologically outgoing, friendly behaviour.
The backstory to the fox study begins more than half a century ago, when the origins of animal domestication were poorly understood and hotly contested.
In 1959, Russian biologist Dmitri Belyaev decided to test his theory that genes played a more important role than human interaction in the gradual metamorphosis of wolves into the man’s-best-friend subspecies we call dogs.
Argued
At the same time, Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz, a pioneer in the study of aggression in animals and humans, argued that new-born wolf puppies raised with tender loving human care would become docile and domesticated.
Belyaev suspected otherwise, and choose Vulpes vulpes — aka the red or silver fox — to make his case.
Russia was full of fox farms which raised and harvested the animals for their fur, offering the perfect opportunity for a large-scale experiment, he reasoned.
“Farm-bred foxes were not domesticated,” said Kukekova, an evolutionary geneticist who began studying the animals 16 years ago. “If you try to touch them, they show fear and aggression,” much as in the wild.
Belyaev found a large farm willing to cooperate, and began to systematically select foxes that exhibited the least stress and fear around people, repeating the process with each new generation.
“After only 10 generations, they got a few puppies that wagged their tail just like dogs when they saw people, even when there was no food,” Kukekova said. “They were just happy to see humans.”
Today, all of the 500 breeding pairs in the tame group are at ease in the presence of humans, even if they are not as domesticated as dogs.