This blog employs a food ethics lens to delve into some of the ethical issues surrounding gene-editing, assessing intended and unintended consequences. Issues discussed include patents, herbicide-tolerant traits, gene drives and food safety.
This review discusses the potential environmental and health risks associated with new genomic techniques (NGTs), which create novel genotypes and traits beyond those produced by conventional breeding or earlier genetic engineering methods. It highlights that large-scale releases of multiple NGT organisms—across species and traits—could lead to interactions and cumulative effects that exceed the risks of individual modifications. The authors argue that risk assessments must account for these combined and indirect effects, not just single events, and recommend a precautionary, prospective technology assessment to guide regulators in limiting release scales and minimizing unintended interactions in the environment.
This article makes two interventions. First, it identifies the discursive continuity linking genome editing and the earlier technology of genetic modification. Second, it offers a suite of recommendations regarding how lessons learned from GM crops might be integrated into future breeding programmes focused on genome editing. Ultimately, the authors argue that donors, policymakers and scientists should move beyond the genome towards systems-level thinking by prioritizing the co-development of technologies with farmers; using plant material that is unencumbered by intellectual property restrictions and therefore accessible to resource-poor farmers; and acknowledging that seeds are components of complex and dynamic agroecological production systems. If these lessons are not heeded, genome-editing projects are in danger of repeating mistakes of the past
Here, we systematically review the scientific literature for studies that have investigated unintended genomic alterations in plants modified by the following GM techniques: Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated gene transfer, biolistic bombardment, and CRISPR-Cas9 delivered via Agrobacterium-mediated gene transfer (DNA-based), biolistic bombardment (DNA-based) and as ribonucleoprotein complexes (RNPs). The results of our literature review show that the impact of such techniques in host genomes varies from small nucleotide polymorphisms to large genomic variation, such as segmental duplication, chromosome truncation, trisomy, chromothripsis, breakage fusion bridge, including large rearrangements of DNA vector-backbone sequences. We have also reviewed the type of analytical method applied to investigate the genomic alterations and found that only five articles used whole genome sequencing in their analysis methods. In addition, larger structural variations detected in some studies would not be possible without long-read sequencing strategies, which shows a potential underestimation of such effects in the literature. As new technologies are constantly evolving, a more thorough examination of prospective analytical methods should be conducted in the future.
This review examines studies on unintended genetic alterations caused by traditional and modern genetic modification techniques, including Agrobacterium-mediated transfer, biolistic bombardment, and CRISPR-Cas9 (delivered by various methods). Findings show that these techniques can produce a wide range of unintended genomic changes—from small mutations to major structural variations like chromosome truncations and large DNA rearrangements. Only a few studies used whole-genome or long-read sequencing, suggesting many such effects may be underestimated. The authors emphasize the need for improved analytical methods to better detect and assess these unintended modifications, helping regulators evaluate the safety of genetically modified and gene-edited organisms.
The aim of this report is to look at the economic, environmental and social impacts of growing RoundUp Ready (RR) crops and newer HT crops. This report reviews more than 25 years of experience with this technology. We conclude that the cultivation of GM HT crops may be regarded as a temporary aberration, rather than the revolution originally proclaimed by the proponents of these crops. The growing failure of RoundUp Ready crops, due to the spread of glyphosate resistant (GR) weeds, provides an opportunity to phase out the use of RR crops and adopt new methods and technologies. The priority should be to reduce and replace the use of herbicides: not to replace RR crops with other herbicide-tolerant crops, whether or not these are GM crops or produced by different methods.
This chapter will focus on the opportunities and challenges presented by digital technology for agroecology in its broadest sense, i.e. sustainable food systems.
Researchers studying Arabidopsis thaliana found that mutations are not random but occur less often in essential and functionally important genes—about half as often within genes and two-thirds less in essential ones. Epigenomic and physical genome features explain over 90% of this variation, and these mutation patterns accurately predict natural genetic diversity. The results show that epigenome-linked mutation bias protects key genes, challenging the traditional view that mutation is a random, directionless process in evolution.
