3.15 Intellectual The Intellectual
"This is great news for researchers and opens the door to the commercialization of gene-edited plants," | Image source: pixabay.com
Introduction
Scientists say the newly released Guidelines for the Safety Evaluation of Gene-Edited Plants for Agriculture (Trial) will further encourage research on plants with higher yields and more resilience to climate change.
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The Chinese government's approval of gene-edited crops has encouraged domestic researchers. The researchers say the rule removes barriers to the use of the plant in agriculture and promotes the development of plant varieties that are more tasty, more resistant to pests and more adaptable to global warming.
Figure 1 As shown in the figure, wheat plants infected with powdery mildew, yield and quality will be reduced| Source: Nigel Cattlin/Alamy
Since the Ministry of Agriculture of The People's Republic of China issued the Guidelines for the Safety Evaluation of Gene-Edited Plants for Agriculture (Trial) (hereinafter referred to as the "Guidelines") on January 24, researchers have rushed to submit application applications for their gene-edited crops, including a study of wheat varieties described in a paper published in Nature that can resist the fungal disease powdery mildew [1].
Gao Caixia, a botanist at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and one of the paper's co-authors, said: "This is great news for researchers and opens the door to the commercialization of gene-edited plants. ”
Kim Jin-so, director of the Center for Genome Engineering at the Institute for Basic Science at South Korea's Institute of Basic Science, said the guidelines were a big step forward for China to move research from theory to the field.
China's new rules are stricter than U.S. regulations (some gene-edited crops may contain minor changes, similar to possible natural variations, which the United States does not regulate), but are more lenient than those in the European Union. The European Union treats all gene-edited crops as genetically modified organisms.
Exogenous genes do not
Gene-edited crops were developed using a variety of techniques, such as CRISPR–Cas9, which fine-tune DNA sequences. These crops differ from plants obtained by transgenic technology, in that the latter tend to insert entire gene fragments or DNA sequences from other plant and animal species. But to date, gene-edited crops in China have applied the same laws as GMOs.
Currently, in China, it can take up to 6 years for genetically modified plants to obtain biosafety permits. But the researchers say the new Guidelines set out the procedures for gene-edited crops to obtain biosafety certificates, which can shorten the approval time to 1 to 2 years.
Genetically modified crops must be extensively tested on a large scale before they can be approved for use. The new Guidelines stipulate that if a gene-edited crop is deemed to be free of environmental or food safety risks, developers only need to provide experimental data and conduct small-scale cultivation experiments to be approved.
However, the researchers say there are still some ambiguities in the Guidelines. The guidelines apply to crops that use gene editing techniques to remove genes and create single nucleotide variations; however, it is unclear whether they apply to crops that have transplanted DNA sequences from other varieties of the same species.
Chu Chengcai, a rice geneticist at South China Agricultural University, said, "We have to further confirm whether such plants are permitted by the Guidelines" because it is important to clarify the rules.
Researchers are already planning to focus further on developing new crop varieties that benefit farmers. For example, Zhu Jianjian, a plant molecular scientist at southern university of science and technology, introduced that he plans to develop a number of gene-edited varieties to increase yields, enhance the ability to cope with climate change, and improve fertilization efficiency.
Other scientists are planning to apply for aromatic rice varieties, as well as high-oleic soybean varieties used to produce soybean oil with lower saturated fat content.
Disease resistance and growth status
Gao Caixia's powdery mildew-resistant wheat could become one of the first gene-edited plants to be approved. In 2014, she and her team used gene editing techniques to knock out a gene that makes wheat susceptible to the fungal disease, but found that these genetic changes also hinder wheat growth [2]. However, among the genetically edited wheat, there is a normal-growing plant. The researchers found that the reason was that a segment of chromosomes was deleted, so the expression of a gene about sugar production was not inhibited.
Later, on the basis of knocking out the genes that cause wheat to be susceptible to powdery mildew, the researchers were able to remove the deleted chromosomes from the plant and develop wheat varieties that could both resist powdery mildew and grow without hindrance.
"This is a very comprehensive, very good study." Yang Yinong, a botanist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, praised it. Yang Yinong also introduced that the technology can be widely used in almost all flowering plants, because powdery mildew can infect about 10,000 plant species.
David Jackson, a plant geneticist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the United States, said that "this study is exciting," but he is cautious because the wheat growth data used in the study is based on only a small number of plants, most of which are cultivated in greenhouses, and larger cultivation trials are needed to verify it.
Studies such as these have shown that China already has strong research experience in gene-edited crops, and as soon as the new regulations are issued, "China will give full play to its academic leadership." Penny Hundleby, a botanist at the John Innes Centre in the UNITED Kingdom, said.
bibliography:
1. Li, S.et al. Naturehttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04395-9 (2022).
2. Wang, Y.et al. Nature Biotechnol.32, 947–951 (2014).
The original article was published in the news section of Nature on February 11, 2022, under the headline China's approval of gene-edited crops energizes researchers. Original link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00395-x?utm_source=wechat&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=CONR_AUTCC_ENGM_CN_CNCM_NFHCN
Plate editor| Ginger Duck