<
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/11/02/1106579/how-a-breakthrough-gene-editing-tool-will-help-the-world-cope-with-climate-change/>
"Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool
CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple with the growing risks
of climate change by delivering crops and animals better suited to hotter,
drier, wetter, or weirder conditions.
“The potential is huge,” says Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in
chemistry for her role in the discovery. “There is a coming revolution right
now with CRISPR.”
Last month, the Innovation Genomics Institute (IGI), which Doudna founded,
hosted the Climate & Agriculture Summit at the University of California,
Berkeley, where speakers highlighted the role that genome editing can play in
addressing the rising dangers of climate change. Doudna sat down for a brief
interview with
MIT Technology Review on the sidelines of the closed-door
event.
She and her coauthors published their landmark paper on the technique in
Science 12 years ago, demonstrating that a bacterial immune system could be
programmed to locate and snip out specific sections of DNA. The earliest
patients have begun receiving the first approved medical treatment created with
the genomic scissors, a gene therapy for sickle-cell disease—and a growing list
of foods created with CRISPR are slowly reaching grocery store shelves.
Many more CRISPR-edited plants and animals are on the way, and a number of them
were altered to promote traits that could help them survive or thrive in
conditions fueled by climate change, beginning to fulfill one long-standing
promise of genetic engineering. That includes the offspring of two cattle that
Acceligen, a Minnesota-based precision breeding business, edited to have
shorter coats better suited to hotter temperatures. In 2022, the US Food and
Drug Administration determined that meat and other products from those cattle
“pose low risk to people, animals, the food supply, and the environment” and
can be marketed for sale to American consumers.
Other companies are harnessing CRISPR to develop corn with shorter, stronger
stalks that could reduce the loss of crops to increasingly powerful storms;
novel cover crops that can help sequester more carbon dioxide and produce
biofuels; and animals that could resist zoonotic diseases that climate change
may be helping to spread, including avian influenza.
For its part, IGI is working to develop rice that can withstand drier
conditions, as well as crops that may suck up and store away more carbon
dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas driving climate change."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/276-nauseously-optimistic/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
