Four intense days of talks and discussions on the present and future of agricultural genetics. We will be there at the round table “Social impact of plant biotechnologies: challenges and opportunities” (12 September afternoon). See the full program here.
The start of the first field trial with an edited plant had been greeted with joy by Italian scientists (here is the announcement in Nature Italy). However, less than two months after planting, unknown persons vandalized the harmless rice plants, Science reported. Fortunately, all was not lost: some plants survived, and with them the hope of completing this experiment and starting new ones. We talked about this with Vittoria Brambilla, who together with Fabio Fornara developed the edited rice at the University of Milan and obtained permission to study it outdoors to see how resistant it is to a fungal infection (rice blast). Please find the interview on the Italian site Agriscienza.
This year Italy authorized the first field trial with an edited plant, a rice variety modified to resist a fungus. The trial was vandalized, but enough plants were saved to continue with reduced goals. Now the Italian Parliament should confirm the regulatory window that made the application possible for next year as well. No experimentation can run out after just one year, and there are many more plants developed in Italy with the New Genomic Techniques that deserve to be tested in the field. This is why the Luca Coscioni Association for Freedom of Scientific Research is collecting signatures and addressing the Parliament. I have signed, you can do so too at this link.
Having attended the festive launch of the first field trial of a CRISPR plant developed in Italy on May 13, we share the dismay of the scientists behind the project – Vittoria Brambilla and Fabio Fornara of the State University of Milan – over the destruction tonight by unknown ecoterrorists of the harmless seedlings, which represented hope for sustainable agriculture and innovative research in our country. The official press release follows. Here are a few links for further reading.
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Nature Biotechnology devoted an editorial to the positive contribution CRISPR can make to the democratization of agricultural biotechnology. The hope is that, without the burden of overregulation, even public institutes and small biotech companies can bring useful products from the lab to the fields. Gene editing without the introduction of “trans” sequences from other species can be given the suffix “cis,” hence the title of the article, Cis-editing for all.
Continue readingThe fence bounds twenty-eight square meters of bare land in the middle of the Lombard countryside. Inside it a dozen researchers from the University of Milan are busy. The laptop resting on the ground shows the layout of the plots. A meter is unrolled to mark the coordinates on the ground. Yellow tags are ready to be stuck into the clods: the inscription TEA (the Italian equivalent of New Genomic Techniques is “Assisted Evolution Techniques”) is used to mark rice that has been genetically edited for resistance to a fungal disease (rice blast), while the abbreviation WT indicates wild-type plants, which have not been modified and serve as a control group.
Continue readingEarly in the morning on Monday, May 13, Vittoria Brambilla will open her technological treasure chest at the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of Milan. In jargon it is called a phytotron and is an air-conditioned room. Here are kept 400 precious plantlets, ready to be transferred to Italy’s first experimental field of the CRISPR era, with the blessing of the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security. Fertile soil awaits them in which to sink their delicate roots, and then sun, wind, rain and perhaps drought and pests. All that changeable stuff happens when you grow outdoors instead of inside a laboratory.” To learn all about this field debut (the first after a 20-year wait in Italy), the trial that is about to begin and who made it possible, there is my new piece for Le Scienze, with comments from Vittoria Brambilla, Roberto Defez, Elena Cattaneo, Roberto Schmid and Federico Radice Fossati, the ag entrepreneur who offered his land for the trial. For more technical details on this fungus-resistant rice there is the article I had published in Nature Italy. In the gallery above, meanwhile, you will find: the researchers of the laboratories directed by Vittoria Brambilla and Fabio Fornara, the sign posted outside the experimental field, the climate-controlled chamber holding the edited seedlings until next week, one of the trays in which they will be transported, the cage delimiting the experimental field, yet to be completed with the upper part (28 square meters in Mezzana Bigli, in the province of Pavia, northern Italy).
While the number of studies on this topic is limited, they generally align in indicating that genome-edited plants are more appealing to the public than GMOs. Supporting this assertion is an analysis set to be published in the June issue of Current Opinion in Biotechnology. Hans De Steur and his colleagues at the University of Ghent in Belgium conducted a review of data collected from various countries worldwide, including Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
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Marco Pasti grows corn, soybeans, wheat, barley, sugar beets, potatoes, some wine grapes and walnuts on his farm near Venice, in Italy. In addition to being a farmer, he is an advocate for science-based agriculture. Don’t miss his opinion piece written for the Global Farmer Network after the European Parliament vote on the New Genomic Techniques last February. After the EU elections next June, the path of the new regulatory framework will resume, which could mark a turning point “in favor of sound science – and possibly a major break from the mistakes of the past when Europeans treated crop innovation with skepticism and even fear.”
It could take a while to bring the first CRISPR products to our tables, but it is always a good time to see what progress is being made in the labs. Here are some novelties, reported by Isaaa: high-fiber barley, aromatic soy milk, extralong-grain wheat, TiGER strawberries, and my favorites: seedless, thornless, and higher-yielding blackberries and black raspberries.
CRISPeR FRENZY 