More and more people around the world are starving. How to deal with it? This is also the concern of the UN at the Food Systems Summit in New York. The new genetic engineering could help, researchers say, with better plants. What’s up with the hopes?

When a researcher is enthusiastic about what a technology can do, it sounds like this: “It’s enormous!” says Ueli Grossniklaus, a plant researcher at the University of Zurich. «Genome editing has our work in the laboratory and the possibilities in application changed in the field. That has fully arrived in plant sciences.”

What is meant is the use of the gene scissors CRISPR-Cas, which enables fine “editing” instead of gross interventions in the genetic material, as with previous genetic engineering.

There is a great need for solutions based on this new technology, not least in agriculture.

Global hunger is growing

800 million people are starving worldwide and the number is growing. How to feed the world population? At the UN Food Systems Summit in New York, proposed solutions are discussed, including the new genetic engineering, genome editing.

Plant researcher Grossniklaus says that, ideally, the aim should be where there are the most losses in the field, “i.e. diseases, pests, but also heat stress or standing water in the field.”

More efficient than conventional breeding

For a long time, for example, attempts were made to breed a wheat variety that was resistant to powdery mildew, a fungal disease that causes major crop losses year after year.

Such resistance could not be achieved using conventional breeding because the genome of wheat is large and complex. Nevertheless, there is now a resistant wheat variety, says Ueli Grossniklaus: “Researchers in China have managed to do this within a very short time using genome editing.” From a research perspective, this was an important breakthrough in 2014.

In contrast to conventional genetic engineering, which interferes relatively roughly with the genome and sometimes introduces genes from other species into the plant, this new wheat was created with very targeted, small interventions in the genome and as a result can hardly be distinguished from conventionally bred varieties.

From the lab to the field

Since then, many genome-edited plants have emerged in laboratories around the world: rice that can cope with salty soil, tomatoes that flower earlier and therefore produce higher yields in the same area, or potatoes that do not suffer from late blight. These are all properties that are relatively easy to manipulate.

For many of these varieties, however, the reality check is still pending: will growing them in the field actually work?

Each country regulates differently

In the USA, a case-by-case assessment is made as to whether a manipulated plant is approved for use in the field. In the meantime, a few dozen genome-edited crops can be grown there.

In China, an enormous amount of money is invested in the development of new plants, but it is very difficult to research how many of these new varieties are already on the field.

In the EU, the use of genome editing is regulated restrictively, but there are considerations of using the technology in the future to make agriculture more crisis-proof – especially in view of global warming.

Much research still needed

But no matter how quickly wheat, which is resistant to powdery mildew, was developed, or the potato, which is resistant to late blight: Plants that can cope with heat stress, lack of water or with fewer nutrients – i.e. less fertilizer – are quickly conceived as an idea, which intervention it is would need in the genome for this is less clear.

There isn’t one gene you can change and you have plants that use nitrogen or water more efficiently.

Catherine Feuillet, who has been doing research in Switzerland for a long time and now works for the American seed developer Inari, says: “There is not one gene that you can change and you have plants that use nitrogen or water more efficiently.”

You have to understand biology better, i.e. how plants absorb and manage water and nutrients. These processes are complex, and the biotech industry has so far failed because of this complexity.

Time is running out

But she expects progress in the coming years, the first soybean and corn varieties that have been edited accordingly are already in the Inari greenhouses and on the test fields.

“Classical breeding cannot deliver what we need quickly enough,” says Feuillet: “Robust new plant varieties that can cope with the changing climate and deliver yields.”

Ueli Grossniklaus from ETH Zurich agrees and adds: “We are in a difficult situation. We have a lot of people on this earth and we have limited resources to produce food. We have to use everything that is possible.”

So far the view and the hopes of the researchers involved in genome editing. What is missing is the debate on how much genome editing in agriculture would be socially desirable, both in Switzerland and globally, and what risks the new technology might entail.