Gene editing: why scientists need to be part of the conversation

They warned that, without international alignment, differing‌ ‌regulatory oversights would impose barriers to global trade. The statement sent a strong message to governments about the need for innovative agricultural technologies to address urgent global challenges, such as food security and climate change.

This court ruling is now being appealed and the French agriculture ministry recently confirmed its opposition to the European Court ruling - a significant move considering France’s position as the EU’s largest agricultural producer.

With the UK no longer a member of the European Union, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has opened a public consultation on the regulation of gene editing in England.

As part of the discussion, our Synthetic Biology Group Leader, Dr Nicola Patron, presented to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee on why EI supported the appeal of the ECJ’s ruling. We spoke to Nicola about her view of the debate and why it’s important for scientists to share their expertise with policymakers.

The urgent and interconnected challenges of food security, climate change, biodiversity loss and human health require the rapid development of healthy crops that improve the sustainability of agriculture.

Global crop yields need to increase by around 50% by 2050 to feed our growing population, which is made more difficult in a changing climate where growing conditions - as well as the spread of pests and pathogens - are already beginning to change.

Reducing the application of agrichemicals and preventing the conversion of existing land to agriculture is highly desirable as both have negative impacts on biodiversity. While reduction in waste and encouraging sustainable agricultural practices will also play a part, the development of nutritious, high-yielding crops that are resilient to stress and disease is critical.

In many countries, including the UK, scientists have started to use gene editing to accelerate the development of nutritious crops, as well as those that require fewer agrichemicals. Gene editing tools allow scientists to make changes as small as deleting a single letter of DNA in a specific gene, adapted from systems that exist in nature.

Gene edited crops have the same types of genetic changes as those developed using long-established conventional breeding technologies but are different to first-generation genetically modification technologies because they typically do not contain any new DNA.

The Patron lab at EI has proven that we can predictably engineer useful traits into a plant by making a very small change, perhaps one or two letters of DNA among the billions in the plant’s genome.

The ruling by the ECJ that all organisms obtained by genome-editing techniques should be subject to the same regulations as genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) was disappointing. Previously, the Advocate General made a clear distinction between mutagenesis (small changes to an organism's DNA) and transgenics (introducing DNA from another species).

Other technologies, including chemicals and radiation, have been used for many decades to introduce mutations, yet these plants are exempted from the genetic modification regulations.

Many crop varieties on the market are the product of mutation technologies. Genome-editing can be used to make exactly the same changes as these older, unregulated mutagenesis technologies but with less time and cost.

Countries around the world - including the US, Canada, Brazil and Australia - have all agreed that the products of the targeted mutagenesis enabled by genome editing tools do not require the regulatory process of GM, and are now using these technologies to develop products.

While the ruling makes little difference to the use of this biotechnology in research - for example, to investigate the functions of genes - it means that the work of UK scientists, including the work that I am doing now, is far less likely to have an impact on UK agriculture.

While companies in the US, Canada, Brazil, and Australia are adopting these new genome editing technologies - and starting to apply the benefits of these plant engineering techniques to increase the sustainability and profitability of agriculture - they will not be applied in Europe.

The goal of crop improvement is to introduce beneficial traits. For example, we might want to combine resistance to emerging diseases, increased nutritional value and other consumer and agricultural traits into plants with a high-yielding genetic background.

Some of this can be done by traditional breeding. However, as this often makes large-scale genetic changes and sometimes introduces undesirable genes that reduce yield. Breeding can therefore be a very slow and expensive process.

In the mid 20th Century, humans began using X-rays and chemicals to induce mutations, and then went on to screen these mutant populations for individual plants with useful traits. This process has brought thousands of new varieties to market. However, each new variety also requires years of development because, alongside the beneficial mutation, there will be hundreds of unwanted mutations.

In the 1980s, scientists developed technologies to bring in the specific gene or genes of interest without making additional unwanted changes. This became known as genetic modification (GM). GM crops are now grown on 185 million hectares of land, by 18 million farmers worldwide, and they have had many benefits.

For example, pest-resistant crops have reduced the number of applications of chemical pesticides, helping to protect the biodiversity of the wider ecosystem. In countries where weeding may previously have been done by hand, herbicide-tolerant crops have made significant improvements to farmers’ income and security.

Genome editing technologies allow us to make just a few changes to the existing DNA at very specific sequences. Foreign DNA does not need to be inserted and the end product may be indistinguishable from one made using older, unregulated technologies like chemical mutagenesis.

It enables us to very rapidly transfer knowledge about gene function, gained from decades of plant science, into useful products for agriculture