Worry about tissue culture as source of mutations and not the genome editing itself!

By Bekir Ulker, CEO and Co-founder bei AgroJector UG, Cologne Germany

A large scale comparative study conducted by Tang et al., (2018) in rice by using whole genome sequencing analyses reveals that tissue culture and other spontaneous mutations are the source of most nucleotide variations and not the genome editing process itself.

The authors found that even the safest breeding approach, harvesting seeds from parental lines, introduces ~ 30 to 50 spontaneous mutations into the next generation in rice. They also observed ~ 200 tissue culture-introduced somaclonal variations per rice plant. In stunning contrast to many conventional breeding technologies editing of the target genes in their study exceptionally precise because they could not find any off-target mutations in 47 out of 49 rice plants edited by 11 Cas9-sgRNA and three Cpf1-crRNA constructs.

This study shows why it is WRONG to call older breeding technologies safer than genome editing and reminds to regulators to regulate the “regulate genome-edited products, not genome editing itself”. This work would be a VALUABLE REFERENCE for regulatory agencies and scientific community.

Tang, X., G. Liu, et al. (2018). "A large-scale whole-genome sequencing analysis reveals highly specific genome editing by both Cas9 and Cpf1 (Cas12a) nucleases in rice." Genome Biol 19(1): 84.