As the process known as genome editing gains more attention, scientists who tout the practice are concerned that government regulators may delay its commercialization, particularly as it applies to new crop traits.
“You have these traits… and as a trait development company the first thing you thing about is, yeah, we should be able to take these out and commercialize them. It’s not quite that easy anymore,” said Jim Radtke, vice-president of product development with Cibus, a U.S. company that used genome editing to develop a non-transgenic canola that is tolerant to sulfonylurea herbicides.
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The trait, branded as SU Canola, has been approved in the U.S. and grown for a couple of years in North Dakota. But Cibus is waiting on regulators in other countries, including Canada, to make a decision on the trait and the technology.
Cibus has also developed a glyphosate tolerant flax, which it hopes to commercialize in 2019.
On its website Cibus says it “plans to develop non-transgenic traits in every major crop” using a proprietary method known as the Rapid Trait Development System.
Many scientists have described genome editing as molecular scissors, or a method for cutting a piece of DNA at a specific location in the genome. For crops, the technology allows breeders to alter a gene in the plant’s DNA without inserting a foreign gene.
Genome editing is comparable to mutagenesis, a method that changes the genetic sequence in a plant using chemicals, but much more precise.
“The advantage of genetic editing … instead of doing all the random mutations, doing the screening … you go directly to the gene … and make that change,” said Faouzi Bekkaoui, executive director of the National Research Council’s Canada Wheat Improvement Flagship Program.
Almost all countries accept crop traits developed with mutagenesis but regulators are hesitating to give the green light to traits created with genome editing.
In January prominent plant biotechnology experts like Roger Beachy, former chief scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, argued in a Nature editorial that genome editing should be treated the same as conventional plant breeding.
Government agencies responsible for crops, food and biotechnology are considering such arguments, but they’re taking a go-slow approach.
“Even though mutations have been widely accepted (on) the international stage… we’re having to reinvent the wheel a little bit… to make sure the technology is acceptable,” Radtke said.
He remains hopeful that key countries like China will approve sulfonylurea tolerant canola.
But there are multiple techniques for genome editing including CRISPR/Cas9, a method that has received the most attention because of its simplicity.
It appears that regulators are going to evaluate each genome editing technique separately, even though they perform similar molecular tasks. The U.S. has approved the Cibus technology for SU Canola but hasn’t made a decision on CRISPR.
“The cutters are (DNA) cutters,” Radtke said. “There’s one called TALENs (that has) been used in developing some traits in potato and soybeans. They have been approved as such in the U.S. the same way we have.”
Cibus expects its SU Canola to be available next year in Canada.
For more information on genome editing, go to http://www.producer.com/2015/11/crispr-cutting-edge-tech-for-plant-breeders/.
