Gene editing: Feeding the future or fuelling controversy?

Inside gene editingCRISPR-Cas9 has many uses in agriculture, and can improve crop resilience to drought and diseaseIt can also improve nutrition, taste and colour in foodControversy remains around gene editing, especially regarding safety and corporate control (including patents)The EU are still debating over how to regulate gene-edited productsGene-editing techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 have many uses in the area of food and agriculture.

They can combat persistent drought and disease, and improve the colour and nutritional content of food while making it tastier to boot.

Yet in Europe, gene editing has been controversial for a long time. It remains a regulatory minefield, due to persisting ethical and safety concerns.

What is CRISPR-Cas9? Gene editing is not new. However, its efficiency was improved dramatically by CRISPR-Cas9, which was developed by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna (they won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for it in 2020). The technology allows errors in the genome to be corrected, and for genes to be switched on and off with relative ease. In the words of Paulo Arruda, a researcher from the University of São Paulo, it can “change a few words in the text” of the genome, a text of around three billion letters. 

CRISPR in agriculture: Enhancing disease and drought resistance Today, crops face many persistent problems. Crop diseases, as well as heat and drought, can all negatively impact yields.

Indeed, a commodity crisis is brewing for this reason, with reduced yields pushing up prices of major crops. With gene editing, resilience to these factors can be improved.

Disease poses an enormous challenge for crops globally. Yields are depleted by a range of infections, such as Asian soybean rust for soy and swollen shoot disease for cocoa.

With crops so sensitive to disease, pesticides are often necessary.

Corn and soy provide a lot of the world’s calories. CRISPR-Cas9 can make them more resistant to disease and drought. (andreswd/Getty Images)Improving the resilience of crops to disease will not only help growers improve yields but will enable them to do so whilst significantly reducing pesticides, explains Paulo Arruda, a researcher from the University of São Paulo.

This could mitigate the negative effects of these chemicals, such as harming the environment.

Small modifications in the plant genome using CRISPR-Cas9 can enable growers to enhance plant resistance to diseases and pests, thus reducing the need for such pesticides.

Plants are also sensitive to heat and drought, which is increasing due to climate change. To help crops cope with drought, explains Arruda, they must be given larger root systems, which can go deeper and take water from further down.

While the root system can be improved directly through gene editing, there is another way as well. If plants can be edited to better associate with beneficial microbes, these microbes will interact with them and allow them to grow deeper.

Such microbes play an important role in plant growth. Areas of Brazil that are dense with biodiversity contain microbes that help plants to grow abundantly, Arruda explains.

Arruda’s start-up, Inedita Bio, is mainly focused on corn and soybean. It is not easy to use gene editing for any plant, because you first need to know the plant’s genome.

CRISPR in food: Taste, colour and nutritionCRISPR-Cas9 is also widely being used to improve certain foods, from avocados and blackberries to tomatoes and mushrooms.

Early products to be developed using the technique include an anti-browning mushroom, which was greenlit in the US in 2016.

The first CRISPR-edited food product released to the public was a gene edited tomato, which came out in Japan in 2021. This tomato was edited to be more nutritious, enriched with GABA, a neurotransmitter.

Tomatoes have also been made sweeter using the technology. A tomato with 30% more sugar was recently developed using CRISPR-Cas9, without changing its size, according to research published in Nature.

Meanwhile, the start-up GreenVenus has used the technology to create non-browning avocados, disrupting an enzyme crucial to the browning process.

Seedless blackberries are currently in development (Liudmila Chernetska/Getty Images)Currently in development, start-up Pairwise is using CRISPR-Cas9 to develop “seedless” blackberries by targeting the genes which are responsible for seed pits in the fruit, making these seeds chewier and softer, like the ones found in grapes and watermelons.

Many more uses of the technology are in development, with the potential to significantly improve food in a number of ways.

The case against gene editing Despite the benefits outlined above, gene editing still remains a controversial topic.

There are many reasons for this. A literature review explored those that were the most common.

Much of the scepticism around gene editing comes from fears around safety, especially in the case of gene drives (where the inheritance of certain genes is enhanced). The reproducibility of this could be dangerous.

Others were concerned that a prevalence of gene edited crops could afford overwhelming control of agriculture to a small group of biotech companies. Specifically, corporate patenting may give control of agriculture to too few companies.

Advocacy group Greenpeace has been a persistent critic of gene editing, suggesting that gene edits can introduce errors, mostly seen in mammals. In plants, the organisation suggests, these errors may introduce novel toxins or allergens.

Furthermore, it pointed out that many consumers are still uncomfortable with gene editing.

Gene editing in EuropeAlong with controversy comes regulation. In some markets, the regulatory situation for gene editing is still not decided.

CRISPR-Cas9 edited crops in the US are not regulated, as they do not contain foreign DNA. In Europe, however, gene edited food and crops are still the subject of fierce debate.

Regulations on gene-edited crops are currently under discussion in the EU. (Pavliha/Getty Images)Critically, gene-edited crops still come under the definition of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and are regulated as such. This means that, while they are not banned per se from the bloc, they are subject to complex regulations, including a safety assessment by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

However, some elements of this regulation have been relaxed. In 2024, the European Parliament voted to simplify regulations around this, making it easier for gene-edited crops to gain regulatory approval.

According to the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP), the EU is still discussing a proposal to create a two-tier regulation for gene-edited products – with some products being classed as GMO, and others not.

If passed, this would be similar to the UK’s proposed approach, which differentiates between crops with genes from two or more species, and ‘precision-bred’ crops.

However, progress is slow, due to disagreements on such crops’ patentability.