CRISPR: Gene-editing

US

Late 2018 headlines give a hint of the imminent impact of CRISPR on just about every area of the tea industry.

• “Your bubble tea could hold the key to helping millions of farmers”

• CRISPR: Editing out pesticides

• Can CRISPR revolutionize your favorite drink: coffee?

CRISPR is the equivalent of molecular scissors that can quickly and easily snip a DNA sequence to modify a gene function. It’s a technique derived from the defense mechanisms of bacteria. This “gene editing” can delete, replace, or add a single gene cheaply and quickly. It’s the opportunities and scares – and consumer concerns – of GMO raised to the “nth” power, where “n” is unknown.

CRISPR stands for “clustered regular interspaced short palindromic repeats.” These are strands in a genome – the genetic code for an organism, human, plant, cellular disease, biomass, oil, tree, embryo, or agricultural crop. “It really opens up the genome of virtually every organism that’s been sequenced to be edited and engineered.” (University of Wisconsin–Madison.)

Here are representative examples of early CRISPR applications:

• Successful trials to make pigs immune to swine fever

• Wheat strain resistant to powdery mildew, a fungal disease.

• Milk cows that don’t grow horns, eliminating the painful process of removal by hot irons to prevent injury.

• Disrupting a single gene to correct a mutation that triggers muscular dystrophy

• Suppressing a gene that causes Huntingdon’s disease

• A white button mushroom that doesn’t brown

• Gene editing human embryos to modify a gene responsible for a potentially fatal blood disorder

• “Knocking out” the resistance of diamond moths, a major worldwide agricultural pest, to multiple insecticides

CRISPR applications are moving towards tea as a primary opportunity.

One firm claims to be able to turn off the genes that generate caffeine in coffee. This will produce a naturally decaffeinated beverage without the costly processes that remove much of its flavor and nutritional value. The bubble tea headline refers to modifying the starch in the tapioca and pearls used in bubble tea. 

The nearly innumerable list of CRISPR developments in agriculture may start with, say, citrus, rice, trees, grass, and pest resistance but they transfer across genomes. Clonal teas, sustainable growth, reforestation, water management, and seeding are all-natural targets for such cross-innovation. Those are rave examples. Scares are just as striking. They include all the GMO concerns: lack of regulation and oversight, nature fighting back, with CRISPR-countering mutations being found in several applications, irresponsible lab tinkering to create designer babies, and irreversible generational inheritance of the new genome. 

Within a year or so, tea sellers will surely be asked the same questions by consumers about CRISPR as for GMO today, especially by those motivated by wellness, sustainability, naturalness, and authentication of tea. Growers will have to address it in assessing pest control and clonal teas. Policy makers and regulators will need to understand CRISPR before they can assess it. Tea labs are surely already positioning for the CRISPR era.

Here’s a last and very recent headline. What’s your instinctive response? Does it seem real or fiction? “Chinese scientists have put human brain genes in monkeys – and, yes, they may be smarter.”

- MIIT Technology Review, April 2019