Agribusiness lands gene editing licensing rights...could lead to more crops, fresher food
Genetics technology could lead to more crops, fresher
food
By KEITH RIDLER August 6, 2018
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A multinational agricultural company
based in Idaho has acquired gene editing licensing rights that could one day be
used to help farmers produce more crops and make grocery store offerings such
as strawberries, potatoes and avocados stay fresher longer.
J.R. Simplot Company on Monday announced the agreement
with DowDuPont Inc. and the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and Harvard University, developers of the nascent gene editing
technology. Simplot is the first agricultural company to receive such a license.
“We think this is a transformative technology — it’s very
powerful,” said Issi Rozen, chief business officer of the Broad Institute.
“We’re delighted that Simplot is the first one to take advantage of the
licensing.”
J.R. Simplot officials declined to say how much the
company paid for the licensing rights acquired through a process intended to
prevent the technology from being used unethically. The technology allows
scientists to make precise changes to the genome of living organisms and has
wide-ranging applications for improving plant food production and quality.
“The issues are about getting the right kind of food
produced in the right kind of way,” said Neal Gutterson, chief technology
officer at Corteva Agriscience, DowDuPont’s agriculture division. “It’s
important to be able to produce enough food for the nine to 10 billion people
who will be on the planet in 30 years.”
The gene editing technology is called CRISPR-Cas9, the
first part an acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic
repeats.” The technology speeds up the traditional process of breeding
generation after generation of plants to get a certain desirable trait, saving
years in developing new varieties that are as safe as traditionally developed
varieties, scientists say.
Essentially, if an organism’s genome is made analogous to
a large manuscript, CRISPR-Cas9 allows scientists to edit specific words in the
manuscript using a “search and replace” function. One of the remaining
challenges, scientists say, is getting the complete genome for particular food
crops. Or, to use the analogy, to not only have the complete manuscript but to
have it translated so scientists know where to make the edits.
The CRISPR-Cas9 technology is so new that in March the
U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates how food is produced, issued a
statement clarifying its oversight of foods produced with gene editing. “Under
its biotechnology regulations, USDA does not regulate or have any plans to
regulate plants that could otherwise have been developed through traditional
breeding techniques,” the agency said.
Simplot markets products in more than 40 countries, and
it has major operations in the United States, China, Canada, Australia and
Mexico. The company, which is a top producer of avocados grown in Mexico and
sold in the U.S., is perhaps best known for potatoes.
The company has already used other genetic techniques to
adapt genes from wild and cultivated potatoes to produce commercially sold
potatoes that resist bruising and late blight, which caused the Irish Potato
Famine and continues to cause problems for potato farmers. Gene editing is
expected to further the company’s expertise in potatoes.
“That’s part of our vision for Simplot — to be the
knowledge leader for potatoes,” said Susan Collinge, vice president of plant
sciences at Simplot, where she supervises about 95 plant scientists.
Idaho produces 13 billion pounds (6 billion kilograms) of
potatoes annually — a third of the nation’s potatoes — worth about $1.2
billion.
Gene editing likely wouldn’t result in new varieties of
potatoes for at least five years, and probably longer before the potatoes could
be sold commercially, Collinge said.
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