
Crispr’d Food, Coming Soon To A Supermarket Near You - sethbannon
https://www.wired.com/story/crisprd-food-coming-soon-to-a-supermarket-near-you/amp
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sethbannon
Basically what this guidance says is that if you're CRISPR'ing food that could
have been created through traditional cross breeding, then it's auto-approved
and falls under the USDA regulatory sphere. If you're creating food that could
not be created through traditional cross breeding, it needs approval and falls
under the FDA's regulatory sphere. Pretty reasonable if you ask me.

~~~
cma
While reasonable, a filename typo couldn't result in inserting genes from the
chickenpox genome into a potato with traditional cross breeding, whereas it
could with CRISPR (at least at some point with digitally specified synthesis
like in the Venter artificial cell).

By having an approval/verification step they could avoid accidents (not that
chickenpox potato is a realistic scenario or threat).

~~~
folli
Resequencing of the modified genome is SOP, how else would you check that the
right gene has been inserted/deleted in the right locus in the right way?

~~~
candiodari
Simple: let it grow. If it turns into purple zombies and eats the town (or
otherwise shows unexpected gene expression), you failed.

A variation on this is to also have it do an easy to check change, like
various forms of fluorescence, then check for the easy to check ones and
assume that if that one happened, the important one happened too.

~~~
malnourish
Not all genes are expressed in the phenotype.

~~~
candiodari
Well, true, but when you're changing genes, you're really looking to change
the phenotype.

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adsfqwop
As far as I know there is no scientific certainty that CRISPR does not produce
off-target mutations. Therefore to use the word "indistinguishable" here seems
quite dishonest.

Because of this fact I get the feeling like we are being sold a marketing
trick. If the gene editing procedure can produce off-target mutations, then it
is not indistinguishable, and to say otherwise is misleading.

"God’s red pencil? CRISPR and the three myths of precise genome editing":
[http://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/16900-god-s-red-
penci...](http://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/16900-god-s-red-pencil-
crispr-and-the-three-myths-of-precise-genome-editing)

~~~
gravelc
If you could write software that could distinguish off-target CRISPR mutations
from sequencing data, you'd have quite a valuable tool. Shouldn't be too
difficult if indistinguishablity is a declared myth.

~~~
amelius
That's pretty easy, because exact matching is easy. Just perform sequencing on
the new genome, and map the sequences back to the original genome (with
edits). If you can't find an exact match, you know something is wrong. You can
also look at the statistics: if some sequences are more prevalent than they
should be, you know something is wrong.

~~~
gravelc
Sequencing has errors - some in the PCR stage so not corrected by greater read
depth for short reads (long reads are much more error prone). Genomes are
dynamic - they change. You are looking at the progeny or regenerated plant,
not the original plant. Exact matching will not get you far.

~~~
amelius
Yeah, but still it's a pretty easy problem compared to de-novo sequencing,
since you have a good reference to map to.

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spraak
The new regulations would be that there is no reporting required if the
modifications could have occurred naturally--but who is responsible for that
determination?

~~~
flyGuyOnTheSly
My thoughts exactly.

This seems like a very slippery slope.

Who can say for sure that editing the genome of a plant in a certain way could
mimic selective breeding?

~~~
zaarn
That's actually pretty easy to tell.

Simply deleting or duplicating genes is entirely natural. Any CRISPR mutation
achieved through merely duplicating or deleting sequences is therefore also
achievable through selective breeding.

Transferring genes from one strain of a species to another while the two
species can interbreed is also very clearly natural.

The above but if the interbreeding process requires artificial help would be
more of a slippery slope but in theory you could still do selective breeding
in that case.

Transferring a gene from a potato to a strawberry would not be achievable by
selectively breeding the two (purely because those two can't interbreed at all
in this example).

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gravelc
The reason why these kinds of food will not be regulated is fairly simple;
unlike previous GMOs, there is no way to tell them apart from 'naturally' bred
counterparts. A regulatory regime would have to solely rely on the developer's
honesty, which isn't really viable.

~~~
jonny_eh
How is the resulting product different from other GMOs?

~~~
folli
Using more traditional techniques, you insert a selection marker (e.g. an
antibiotic resistance) which helps you selecting clones where the modification
successfully took place (all the clones which do not have the antibiotic
resistance will die after applying the antibiotic, leaving only clones where
the modification was successful).

In a next step this marker is usually removed, but this still leaves some
"scars" (e.g. so called "FRT scars", a short DNA sequence), that could
theoretically be used to prove that modifications were made.

Because CRISPR-Cas9 is very efficient, these steps are not needed anymore, so
in theory there are no artifacts which would hint that any "non-natural"
modifications would have occurred.

~~~
inciampati
It's efficient but not so precise and efficient that the modifications can't
be seen as different that the background genome.

~~~
gravelc
That isn't really correct. If you delete a section of DNA, then the difference
is that piece of DNA has been excised. Given that excision (or duplication)
can occur naturally, there is no way of telling whether the change is due to
CRISPR or not. It doesn't leave tell-tale signs.

If there were a strict regulatory regime, there's simply no way of enforcing
compliance. Of course it's simple when you put in something that's obviously
exogenous - cheap genome sequencing will pick it up, hence why that will be
regulated. Anything else, and you're relying on an honesty system.

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spraak
I really think technology like this is energy misapplied or wasted. It's
overly zoomed in on individual plant's performance, where actually addressing
human created problems in ecosystems and the environment on a whole seems much
more important. It's like trying to harden the security on your house while
living in a dangerous neighborhood instead of just moving somewhere else.

~~~
DubiousPusher
Except that we can't "move somewhere else." Or so least no one has provided a
valid plan for such a "move".

We have massively increased yields and cultivated nearly all the best land
just to keep pace with the human population boom.

By all accounts, that boom will continue for some time until it peaks and the
only viable way to feed that many people is to increase yield density.

If we can grow that density even faster than the pace of population growth we
may even be able to turn back some of that land and mitigate the vast habitat
destruction we've perpetrated on the biosphere.

IMO, supporting GMOs is one of the most environmentally concious things you
can do.

~~~
craftyguy
> By all accounts, that boom will continue for some time until it peaks and
> the only viable way to feed that many people is to increase yield density.

We could also work to reduce the peak. You know, fight the illness, not the
symptoms?

~~~
DubiousPusher
Nations and NGOs are doing this. Many are working very hard to spread
contraception and reproductive hygiene. The growth has been significantly
curbed by this effort with peak population estimates being revised down
several times.

But many societies have difficult to breach social norms regarding even
talking about sex. social norms are very hard to change and we've made amazing
progress in just a century.

But it's possible we've reached something like a hard limit on how quickly we
can change people's beliefs.

I for one haven't heard of any new revolutionary psychology that will help
move this along faster.

We have to tackle this problem from all sides.

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labster
Food so good, it'll rewrite your taste buds!

~~~
gravelc
Imagine what food from atomic gardens would do! I suspect that many consumers
would be surprised that atomic gardens and the like were and are a thing
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening)).

New highly directed techniques like CRISPR are a boon to everyone, breeder and
consumer alike. Random mutagenesis, whether it be naturally occurring or
induced chemically/radioactively, has so much more scope for unintended
consequences.

~~~
campground
It's like simulated annealing over the gene space.

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phkahler
Serious question:

Won't these foods contain CRISPR itself? Isn't that a potential hazard?

Here, eat some gene editing scissors... Don't worry, the instructions for what
to modify will break down _after_ the editing mechanism itself. We promise.

~~~
folli
No, you can transfect the cells directly with Cas9 (the enzyme) and guide RNA,
so you don't need to integrate the Cas9 gene into the genome, i.e. it won't be
replicated and will vanish after cell division.

