This week the royal couple of science journals have turned the spotlight on CRISPR’s potential for agriculture. “Genome editors take on crops” and “CRISPR, microbes and more are joining the war against crop killers” are the titles respectively chosen by Science and Nature. The first one is a perspective by Armin Scheben and David Edwards from the University of Western Australia. “Improved crops are urgently needed to meet growing demand for food and address changing climatic conditions”, they write. The global population is expected to rise from 7.3 to 9.7 billion by 2050 and a global increase in crop production of 100 to 110% from 2005 levels will be required. Continue reading
News review: edited crops in Science and Nature
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By Antonio Polito
CRISPR is radically changing the way researchers work, by allowing better, faster, and cheaper experiments. This blog will tell, among other things, how leading labs are using the most popular technique for genome editing. Let the dance begin with the Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology and Pharmacology of Neurodegenerative Diseases of the University of Milan (
Stunning, revolutionary, momentous: these are some of the adjectives sprinkled by leading international journals over CRISPR. In the last few years the new technique of genetic modification has been mentioned in hundreds of studies, not counting the articles published in the lay press. The keyword CRISPR (pronounced 
Refining, chiselling, correcting DNA letter by letter. You can do it simultaneously in dozens of selected sites, or in one place, leaving no trace. A new kind and powerful technique is changing the face of biology. Cheap and easy to handle but precise as a laser. It allows reaserchers to change living organisms as they wish, by carefully targeting their DNA. It doesn’t bombard them by means of random mutations, it doesn’t cut and sew the DNA in a traditional way, as in the past. Will it transform medicine, agriculture and the world as we know it? Enthusiasm and fears are chasing each other, and this book explains the unfolding revolution. Welcome to the age of CRISPR. 
CRISPeR FRENZY 