Crop failures: Ireland and EU left behind as gene editing marches on

By Anthony King

The EU is falling behind in crop improvement because of its outdated policies on gene editing, say crop scientists. Japan, Canada, the US and now the UK all allow some gene editing of crops, but the EU remains lumbered by legislation written two decades ago. Gene editing allows the DNA of crops to be tweaked to boost sustainability.

It could generate crops less thirsty for pesticide and fertiliser inputs, as well as prepare crops for a future of increasing heat and drought stresses due to climate change. Also, pests and diseases are on the move, due to climate change, at a time when we are trying to reduce pesticide use.

The potential of gene editing is not a fringe viewpoint. “It is a breakthrough technology with huge potential,” says Dr Ismahane Elouafi, the chief scientist of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). “As a scientist, I don’t see it in the same category as GMOs [genetically modified organisms].” She would like to convince the EU to change its views, and she sees gene editing as crucial for improving food security and reducing global hunger.

Crispr-Cas9 – often illustrated as a scissors cutting DNA strands – is used in some bacteria to record DNA sequences of viruses they’ve encountered. They then chop them up (with the Cas9 enzyme) whenever the viral sequences reappear. In 2018, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel prize in chemistry for its discovery and advancing its potential in gene editing.

“The beauty of it is that it works across kingdoms – so plants, animals, bacteria,” says Dr Eoin Lettice, plant scientist at University College Cork. “I am interested in how it can be applied in improving plants, to introduce crop varieties that boost yields or improve resistance to stresses,” including plant diseases.

Since the 1940s, crop breeding has involved bombarding seeds with radiation or chemicals to trigger DNA mutations. The resulting plants were grown up and screened for beneficial traits, which is slow and expensive. Many vegetables in our supermarkets were developed this way.

In the 1990s, researchers figured out how to move genes from one species to another, even from a bacterium to a plant. Early GMOs had resistance to herbicides, which were then sprayed with this herbicide to kill off other plants. More recently, in the UK, scientists introduced a gene for omega 3 oils from fish into plants, so that fish oils could be produced on a farm.

The European Commission describes climate change and environmental degradation as 'an existential threat to Europe and the world'.

But in the 1990s there was a backlash against such genetic modified organisms (GMOs), dubbed Frankenfoods, because genes from one species were placed into another. “No matter how much you tell people it is safe, in the back of their minds there is a fish gene going into a plant, and there is unease about that,” says Lettice. Also, a plant that allowed better killing of weeds or insect pests did not grab consumers as especially useful. There were concerns about these newfangled crops, and plant scientists failed to convince the public of their merits and safety.

Growing precision

The EU introduced tough regulations for GMOs in 1991 – so tough and expensive that a maize with an insecticide from bacteria was the only ever approved GMO crop in Europe. Subsequently, the discovery of Crispr-Cas9 allowed plant geneticists to delete a few letters of DNA or disable genes. “It is much more precise,” says Lettice.

Crop scientists were then left bewildered by a 2019 decision by the European Court of Justice that gene editing should fall under GMO regulations. It meant random crop mutations made by chemicals got a pass, whereas gene-edited crops would be regulated in a way that left them commercially non-viable.

In April a report for the European Commission acknowledged that the EU’s policy of treating gene-edited crops as GMOs was not fit for purpose, and that gene editing could help with more sustainable crops. Last month the UK announced that it would diverge from the EU in how it polices gene editing.

The rest of the world is moving on.

Read the full article on the Irish Times.