Crispr/Cas researchers hit roadblock in Europe

Sophien Kamoun studies plant diseases at the Sainsbury Laboratory in England, and in March his team published a paper describing a tomato they’d tweaked. Using the gene-editing technique Crispr/Cas9, Kamoun’s group snipped out a piece of a gene called Mildew Resistant Locus O, or Mlo. That deletion makes the tomato resistant to powdery mildew, a serious agricultural problem that takes a lot of chemicals to control.

Kamoun’s “Tomelo” actually looks a lot like a naturally occurring tomato, a mutant with the same resistance. “At least in the tomato plants we have, there was no detectable difference between the mutant and the wild type,” Kamoun says. “Obviously we’d need to do more detailed field trials, but there was certainly nothing obvious.”

But for now, that’s where Kamoun’s work stops. European regulations make the tomato essentially illegal—he and others can do the science, but probably can’t get it to field trials, and certainly can’t get it to market. “There’s more clarity in the US. One could probably get approval. But in Europe, it’s a big question mark,” he says. “I’m very frustrated by this, I have to be honest. Scientifically this plant is no different from any mutant we’d get from traditional breeding or traditional mutagenesis. I really don’t understand what the problem is.”

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