Push for food security: China to allow gene-edited crops

China has published trial rules for the approval of gene-edited plants, paving the way for faster improvements to crops.

The new guidelines, published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs late on Monday, come amid a raft of measures aimed at overhauling the country's seed industry, which is seen as a weak link in efforts to ensure national food security.

Beijing has also recently passed new regulations that set out a clear path for approval for genetically modified (GM) crops.

Gene editing is a newer technology that is seen as less risky than GM because it does not involve adding any foreign genes to a plant.

Instead, scientists 'edit' or alter genes already in a plant to improve or change its performance, aiming for better yields or increased nutrients.

The technology's precision makes it much faster than conventional breeding or genetic modification, and also lowers the cost. Regulation is also less cumbersome in some countries.

"This really opens the door for plant breeding. It's an infinite opportunity to improve crops more precisely and much more efficiently," said Han Gengchen, chairman of seed company Origin Agritech.

The draft rules stipulate that once gene-edited plants have completed pilot trials, a production certificate can be applied for, skipping the lengthy field trials required for the approval of a genetically modified plant.

China's leadership said in late 2020 that the country needed to use science and technology for an urgent "turnaround" of its seed industry, which has long struggled with overcapacity and little innovation.

While Beijing is expected to allow the planting of GM corn as early as this year, it may soon promote gene-edited crops too.

The country's research institutes have already published more research on market-oriented gene-edited crops than any other country, according to Rabobank.

"Given the strong investment of the Chinese government in genome editing, we expect the release of a relatively open policy in the coming years," it said in a recent report.

There have been other instances of gene editing as well.

Jill Banfield, a University of California at Berkeley ecosystem scientist and 1999 MacArthur Foundation fellow, had become curious in 2006 about mysterious repeating DNA sequences that were common in microbes that live in some of the planet’s most extreme environments, such as deep-sea heat vents, acid mines and geysers. She just needed a biochemist to help explain what the sequences known as Crispr/Cas9 were, and ideally somebody local.

The best scientist-location tool available to the highly decorated PhD researcher—a web search—recommended a Berkeley RNA specialist named Jennifer Doudna. The two met for tea at a campus lunch spot. Doudna hadn’t heard of Crispr, a kind of microbial immune system, and was intrigued. So much so that over the next few years she would go on to solve the sequence’s structure, which turned out to be something of a miraculous cut-and-paste tool for DNA. The discovery heralded an era of genomics that is revolutionizing science and multiple industries and earned Doudna half the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Now, 15 years after their initial meeting, Banfield, Doudna and a large team of co-authors have published a paper that takes a major step toward solving the thorny problem of how to study and alter genomes of microbes living in complicated real-world environments, such as the gut microbiome or soil. The complexity of microbial communities has been a major obstacle to discovering technologies that can prevent diseases and improve agriculture. It’s a critical step toward curbing methane, a harmful greenhouse gas that is emitted during rice production.

The work is a part of the Innovative Genomics Institute, a consortium she founded to develop uses for Crispr and other genetic engineering techniques to solve problems in health, food production and elsewhere. The IGI in July received a $3 million gift from an anonymous donor to pursue climate work, and Banfield’s research on microbial ecosystems is fundamental to that push.

Soil is “the most difficult ecosystem on the planet to study,” Banfield said. “It’s the most complex. It really was the Holy Grail to be able to get any insights into soil microbial communities.”