Gene editing technologies have been used to improve agricultural products for more than two decades. One of the earliest editing technologies was Transfer DNA, T-DNA, which is extracted from Agrobacterium tumefaciens, a tumor-causing bacteria that infects plants and injects its DNA into their cells to reproduce.
Julien Curaba, PhD, chief scientific officer at Eremid Genomic Services, tells GEN that the technology, which is still used to generate transgenic plants, is not without challenges, primarily the inability to control where the new genes are inserted once they enter the cell. It helps explain why newer technologies like Crispr have begun to gain ground both for plant and animal genomes.
Last year, British company Genus developed Crispr-edited pigs that are resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, which has decimated pig populations. Companies like Elo Life Sciences and Inari are using gene editing techniques to sustainably improve food crops. While Eremid does not provide gene editing services directly, the company works with various agbio partners that do. It provides sequencing services to help its partners assess the outcomes of the editing efforts and ensure that their changes yield the desired phenotypes without damaging the integrity of the plant.
From Curaba's perspective, one of the primary benefits of editing technologies is the ability to get improved varieties of agricultural products to market much faster than with traditional breeding. The largest bottleneck for agricultural producers is the turnaround time for developing improved varieties with traditional breeding. Gene editing gives scientists "a fast way of creating new varieties of plants," he says.
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