The UK government is exploring the possibility of using gene editing to modify livestock and food crops, for instance to make crop plants resistant to drought and disease. Gene editing is strictly regulated in the European Union, in what virtually amounts to a ban, but now the UK has left the EU it has some freedom to set its own rules.
The by environment secretary George Eustice at the Oxford Farming Conference on Thursday.
“Gene editing is a mechanism to precisely edit the genome of an organism,” says Lesley Torrance at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, UK. Instead of inserting entire genes, or changing DNA at random, gene editing allows for highly specific changes – even changing a single “letter” of an organism’s DNA sequence.
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For instance, in 2018, UK researchers grew a trial crop of a genetically edited oilseed, Camelina sativa, a relative of oilseed rape. The , causing the plants to produce lots of oleic acid, a relatively healthy fatty acid.
Like many gene editing projects, the modified oilseed was created using a technology called CRISPR-Cas9, which in 2020 won two of its pioneers the Nobel prize in chemistry.
One possible use of gene editing is to improve the iron content of white flour, says Janneke Balk at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK. In the UK, the law requires that white flour contains a minimum amount of iron, so the iron is added artificially. Her lab is exploring ways to create high-iron wheat by gene editing.
However, before Brexit these crops had little chance of reaching supermarkets, because the EU has a fraught history with genetic modification. It has strictly regulated “transgenic” crops, which carry genes transplanted from other species. Genetically modified crops like these prompted the 1990s scare around “Frankenfoods” and were opposed by environmental groups like Greenpeace. This opposition was primarily cultural, because the health and environmental risks from these crops were minimal.
Gene editing causes much smaller changes than wholesale gene transplants. The changes are often indistinguishable from naturally occurring mutations, except they have been precisely chosen. Previously, plant breeders often created mutations at random by exposing seeds to chemicals or radiation. Many popular foods were made this way, and some sweet potatoes even carry bacterial genes that were naturally transferred millennia ago.
For this reason, many researchers have hoped that gene editing would escape the stringent regulation that has stymied transgenic crops in the EU, and instead be governed by the more permissive regulations used for conventional breeding and radiation mutagenesis. However, in 2018 the Court of Justice of the European Union , and subjected to the .
“Before the ruling from the European Court of Justice, it was eaten in the EU in a limited way, because various countries had independently made a decision that actually if it is just this small mutation that isn’t different from something you can do naturally, it shouldn’t be treated as GM,” says Wendy Harwood, also at the John Innes Centre.
For instance, Stefan Jansson of Umeå University in Sweden , cooked and ate – with . That wouldn’t be possible now.
For many crop biologists, the situation is bizarre. “Radiation mutagenesis creates massive random mutations across the entire genome, yet plants produced by this process do not undergo the same regulatory regime [as gene editing],” says Torrance.
Leaving the EU’s gridlocked approval system for gene editing is a potentially genuine benefit to the UK from Brexit. It isn’t yet clear how much the UK government plans to change the rules and thus what might be allowable.
For Balk, every new crop should be judged on its own merits – and in particular on how it works in practice. “What gene is it, what have you changed, have you checked everything, yes or no?” she says. Whether the genetic change was achieved by CRISPR, radiation or something else is secondary to its actual effect, she argues.
