CRISPR Crops: Food, Farms, and the Shape of Plants to Come

Summary

Highlights

• Evan Gruber explains the CRISPR-Cas9 technology and its transformative impact on agriculture 👨‍🔬.
• CRISPR helps produce more sustainable, nutritious, and resilient crops while reducing environmental impact 🌱.
• Gene editing can accelerate traditional breeding processes, solving issues like gluten sensitivity more efficiently 🌾.
• Examples like engineered wheat and cassava illustrate how CRISPR can address food safety and environmental challenges 🥖.
• The potential to develop self-cloning plants could revolutionize how farmers engage with crop cultivation, reducing costs and increasing yield 🌾.

Key Takeaways

• CRISPR-Cas9 is revolutionizing crop development, offering improved yields and resilience for a growing global population 🌾.
• Gene editing holds the potential to solve major agricultural challenges like pest resistance and crop nutritional enhancement 🐛🍅.
• Historical agricultural changes faced public resistance, similar to current resistance against GMOs, indicating a need for better public education 📚.
• Climate change requires innovative agricultural practices, and CRISPR offers a practical tool for adaptation and mitigation 🌍.
• The future of agriculture could include crops tailored for specific environmental challenges, enhancing global food security 🌱.

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to CRISPR Crops The chapter titled 'Introduction to CRISPR Crops' begins with an opening by Evan Gruber, a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. He welcomes the audience to his talk, which is centered around the topic of 'CRISPR crops: food, farms, and the shape of plants to come.' The introduction sets the stage for a discussion on significant developments in the field of CRISPR and its impact on agriculture and plant biology, particularly focusing on future possibilities and innovations.
• 00:30 - 05:00: History of Agricultural Domestication This chapter delves into the history of agricultural domestication, focusing on recent advancements in plant science and agriculture, particularly through gene editing. A highlight is the use of CRISPR Cas9, a groundbreaking tool that enables biologists and crop breeders to create new diversity in crop plants more effectively. The speaker also expresses gratitude towards the hosts, Wonder First, for successfully transitioning a live event to a YouTube format.
• 05:00 - 11:00: CRISPR-Cas9 and Genetic Modification The chapter titled 'CRISPR-Cas9 and Genetic Modification' begins with the urgency of addressing the impending challenge of feeding a projected global population exceeding 9.7 billion by the year 2050. The speaker, likely a plant scientist, highlights the necessity of nearly doubling our current agricultural output to meet the future demand. This sets the stage for discussing the potential of CRISPR-Cas9 technology and genetic modification in revolutionizing agriculture to achieve these goals.
• 11:00 - 24:00: Improving Crop Nutrition and Safety The chapter discusses the challenge of increasing crop nutrition and safety amidst the constraint of reducing land use to prevent deforestation. It highlights that this task may be one of humanity’s biggest challenges in the next three decades. The text introduces gene editing and genetic modification as revolutionary tools in agricultural productivity. It promises to share stories of farmers and scientists who are actively combating climate change using these technological advancements.
• 24:00 - 32:00: Supporting Farmers with Gene Editing The chapter titled 'Supporting Farmers with Gene Editing' discusses the common perception of genetic modification in agriculture as a negative force. The speaker aims to shift this perspective by highlighting the vital role of genetic tools in enhancing food safety, meeting the demands of a growing global population, protecting farmers, and sustaining the environment ethically. The chapter also delves into the historical development of crops and the process of domestication.
• 32:00 - 41:00: Future Possibilities with Genetic Engineering This chapter explores the transformative potential of genetic engineering in agriculture. It delves into the historical context of crop cultivation and introduces CRISPR-Cas9 as a groundbreaking tool that is reshaping crop growth in terms of sustainability, nutrition, and safety. The chapter also discusses how genetic modification is altering food production, farming practices, and how plants can adapt to climate change. It emphasizes the crucial role of public opinion and individual perspectives in driving societal acceptance and implementation of these advancements.
• 41:00 - 41:00: The Importance of Genetic Modification for Global Food Security The chapter discusses the impact of the CRISPR-Cas9 genetic modification revolution on agriculture, starting with historical perspectives from 17th-century still life paintings. The text emphasizes the evolution of agriculture and the familiar appearance of certain fruits through time, hinting at the transformative potential of genetic technologies in enhancing food security globally.

CRISPR Crops: Food, Farms, and the Shape of Plants to Come Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] [Music] good evening my name is Evan Gruber and I've been PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in the Department of plant and microbial biology thank you so much for coming out to my talk titled CRISPR crops food farms and the shape of plants to come tonight I'm going to talk about some big
• 00:30 - 01:00 ideas in plant science which is my field also in agriculture and in gene editing specifically with regards to a new tool called CRISPR caste 9 that is allowing biologists and crop readers alike to really progress the way that were able to generate new diversity in crop plants now really before I get started I wanted to take an opportunity to thank Wonder first to has been so awesome and facilitating this whole event if you don't know this was supposed to be a live event and they have been really amazing in facilitating this transition to a youtube event so thank you to them
• 01:00 - 01:30 and thank you to you for your attention as we get going so a lot of the ideas that I'll talk about today have to do with this graph and as a plant scientist I find myself thinking about this graph pretty frequently what this shows is a UN estimate of our human population in just 30 years time in 2050 and what we can see is that our human population is set to exceed nine point seven billion people feeding that many mouths will mean that we'll have to practically double our agricultural output from where it currently sits and in doing so
• 01:30 - 02:00 we're gonna have to do it on even less land than what we're used to as to mitigate deforestation from almost every estimate meeting this challenge will probably be the most significant hurdle faced by humanity in the next 30 years but today I'm here to tell you that there's hope I'm gonna tell you about a revolution in agricultural productivity enabled by gene editing and genetic modification and the stories of the farmers and scientists fighting on the front line against climate change now you might have heard the gene editing or
• 02:00 - 02:30 genetic modification of Agriculture is some nefarious force and you're not alone a lot of Americans think that but today I'm here to give you a different perspective I'm here to tell you that these tools are going to be absolutely in value and improving our feud for human safety for meeting the needs of a growing population while protecting the people that grow our food and also for really preserving and sustaining our environment in the way that is most ethical I'm going to tell you the story of where our crops have come from and how domestication has taken place in
• 02:30 - 03:00 crops historically and then I'm going to tell you about a new tool called CRISPR cast 9 that's revolutionizing the way the farmers and scientists are able to grow crops for sustainability for nutrition and for safety I'm gonna tell you how CRISPR and genetic modification is changing the food that we eat the way that we farm and the way that we could be using plants to meet the needs of a changing climate and finally I really hope to impart on you how your opinions and your perspectives can be absolutely instrumental in enabling this societal
• 03:00 - 03:30 revolution kind of brought on by CRISPR cos 9 and I hope to kind of inform your perspective on that a little bit with the evidence that I'll present today so to talk about where we're going in agricultural improvement I think it's very important to talk about where we've been in agriculture and that's why I like to start with still lifes so I ask that you consider this still life from the 17th century in Italy what we see is a lot of fruits you know stone fruit pears apples they all look pretty similar to the things that we're used to seeing today but this watermelon looks
• 03:30 - 04:00 entirely wacky compared to what we're used to it's mostly rind it's full of seeds and it looks hardly edible compared to the things that we're used to eating fast forward a hundred and fifty years and things haven't really improved for the watermelon this was a still life that was actually done in the US so this is a whole continent away and humans still really haven't gone in the whole watermelon thing down now what this really tells us is that much of the improvement that has made watermelon seedless and fleshy and delicious has really occurred in the past hundred years and what I mean to highlight here
• 04:00 - 04:30 is that agricultural improvement the actual you know modification of our crops to be more suitable for human consumption is a very active process now while this process has been going on for thousands of years there's still a lot of huge improvements to be made and today I'm going to tell you about that process of domestication how we've got here and then also some of those improvements that we can make with new genetic modification technologies now you have to imagine that if you were a human about 13,000 years ago there really wasn't even agriculture yet humans were mostly nomadic at that point
• 04:30 - 05:00 and while they had traveled to most of the continents of the earth they were still kind of roaming around picking berries hunting animals being you know traditional hunter-gatherer types now this all changed in about 11,000 BC and what was called the Neolithic Revolution and this is when a group of humans in modern-day Turkey Iraq and Syria what we call the Fertile Crescent descended upon an area that they saw was very suitable for domestication of crops and so they found wild species of grasses like einkorn wheat which we see
• 05:00 - 05:30 here and actually started breeding them together to make them more suitable for producing food for humans this wasn't just limited to crops humans actually also figured out that they could domesticate large animals and they also started you know setting up complex systems of irrigation where they were going fishes essentially establish all of these primordial talk knowledge ease that really brought human society together and and really it was agriculture and domestication of wild species that were actually the foundation of human civilization what's
• 05:30 - 06:00 interesting about this phenomenon is that it wasn't really unique to the Fertile Crescent and if we look all across the earth we can see in the following centuries that humans were actually independently discovered agricultural domestication multiple times and in multiple regions of the earth and so just as soon as wheat and barley a domestic been domesticated in the Fertile Crescent we can see in Africa things like sorghum and peas and types of beans were being domesticated simultaneously rice was being domesticated in East Asia if we look all around the earth we can see different signatures of agricultural crop
• 06:00 - 06:30 domestication where wild crops were turned into foodstuffs for humans that could be grown successively over multiple years now across human civilizations some of the first wild plants to be investigated were cereal grains so this is where grasses were turned into things like wheat and barley and maize and sorghum and so a really extreme example of this is teosinte which is this tiny little grass that grows in parts of Mexico that over several millennia was domesticated into modern corn which we can see here
• 06:30 - 07:00 besides the domestication of grasses the domestication of fruits was also really central to the foundations of society here we see a really good example in banana which if you look at the wild variety it looks practically inedible for the amount of seeds that it has and how thick and kind of you know rough its its skin is and over many many generations mostly in Papua New Guinea and then later in other parts of the world banana was domesticated into the delicious fruits that we have today and so what I hope this imparts in you is that agriculture has really never been a
• 07:00 - 07:30 natural process for as long as we've been growing foods as a part of our society agriculture has been a intentional process of modification of plants now in the millennia of following the initial domestication of crops humans were able to make really great strides in the food that we eat and the way it was able to be farmed and this was all happening through conventional breeding where one plant was crossed by another and their offspring would take on some of the traits of its parents but up until the 1800s no one really
• 07:30 - 08:00 understood the true mechanics of that inheritance this all really changed in the 1850s with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution Darwin was able to show that there would actually existed really sound evidence for the transmission of traits in a predictable manner from parent to offspring but also that this phenomenon this evolutionary phenomenon really accounted for most of the things that had been observed in the domestication of crops and in the evolution of wild organisms this theory was really greatly expanded on by an Augustinian friar
• 08:00 - 08:30 named Gregor Mendel who was able to show the exact mechanics of how traits were passed from parent to offspring he did this by breeding peas together and seeing how traits segregated generation to generation now what Mendel had really discovered was this concept of a gene of a fundamental unit of inheritance that passes between generations while he had described genes very eloquently no one really understand what they were made of and in the decades following his work scientists sought to understand the material basis for the gene this all
• 08:30 - 09:00 came with the discovery and the characterization of DNA now newfound understanding of DNA and genetic inheritance had huge implications on the way the humans were able to improve crops and perhaps the most notable historical example of this is appeared called the Green Revolution from 1950 to 1970 the Green Revolution was essentially an international technology transfer initiative where Americans mostly American philanthropic organizations and agronomists passed a bunch of expertise to the developing world to help them increase their
• 09:00 - 09:30 agricultural output now beyond the use of kind of agro chemical techniques so that's like fertilizers and pesticides the Green Revolution mostly dealt with breeding crops for improved pest tolerance drought tolerance and yield and so if we look on the right here we can see this this kind of stunted dwarf variety is actually a really improved variety of wheat that was championed in the Green Revolution the implementation of dwarf varieties of wheat and rice actually is said to have saved about a billion people in the period from 1950 to 1970 if we look at just wheat yield
• 09:30 - 10:00 alone in some of the Green Revolution countries we can see that the implementation of advanced breeding techniques really improved output and this actually wasn't just in the developing world and so I tell you about the Green Revolution for essentially two reasons and the first is that it's a great example of how when technology improves we can really do great things for agriculture and the second reason I tell you is because it's an excellent example of how American philanthropic organizations can really spearhead agricultural improvement in the developing world which I will make a
• 10:00 - 10:30 case for as being absolutely essential in the coming decades beyond enabling a huge transformation in agronomic productivity in the Green Revolution the understanding of DNA inheritance also had huge implications on tools that we could use to improve crops one kind of quirky example of this is called atomic garden so after World War two American scientists and politicians were looking for new ways that they could use atomic energy for peacetime solutions and one of the things that they thought to do was to set up these huge gardens full of thousands of plants that they would then
• 10:30 - 11:00 I radiate with gamma radiation and what they found is that when you systematically mutagenize a lot of plants sometimes you'll produce new varieties that have traits that are appealing for farmers or consumers while atomic gardening is really quirky you might be surprised to learn that over a thousand varieties that are currently sold in stores have been generated with mutagenesis based techniques like this so that means if they weren't just using radiation maybe they were using chemical mutagens or other tools for systematically randomly mutagenize the genomes of
• 11:00 - 11:30 plants beyond random mutagenesis humans also started to discover new molecular biological techniques for the insertion of genes into genomes of organisms this mutagenesis breeding technique like atomic gardening and then also the insertion of foreign genes into plants became pretty popular in the 2000s as new means of producing diversity and kind of desired traits into crop plants but still the great feat of genome engineering of gene editing remained elusive and that is to be able to very intentionally and specifically modify a
• 11:30 - 12:00 gene within a very very precise point within an organism's DNA code this all changed with the discovery of CRISPR caste 9 CRISPR cast nyan is a molecular biological tool that lets scientists and plant breeders specifically modify the genomes of living things at a designated site inside of their long DNA code CRISPR cast line was discovered in about 2011 right here in Berkeley and has seen incredible popularity as a new tool for Biological exploration and crop
• 12:00 - 12:30 improvement but it actually wasn't really discovered for the sake of being a genome editing tool it was discovered as a constituent part of a bacterial immune system and so in perhaps what is something that is very relevant to our whole Kovan thing going on right now it's worth pointing out that besides humans bacteria also are in a constant war with viruses that exist in their environment and for bacteria these viruses are called bacteria phage and just like us bacteria have an adaptive immune system
• 12:30 - 13:00 that is able to be exposed to a virus then learn to recognize that virus and kill it upon subsequent exposures for bacteria that immune system is called CRISPR so let's take ourselves inside of a bacterial cell and learn what happens when it's infected by a bacteria phage usually the bacteria phage will land on the surface of that bacterial cell and insert a bit of DNA inside of the bacterium now in most situations this is the end of the story the virus replicates itself inside of the bacteria causes the bacteria to explode and all
• 13:00 - 13:30 of those progeny viruses go off into the population and take out more bacteria but in certain situations when a CRISPR immune system is present the bacterium is able to recognize that viral D they grab it and embed it inside of its own genome inside of its own DNA code between a series of very kind of repeated and palindromic pieces of DNA these palindromic pieces of DNA are called clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats or CRISPR now
• 13:30 - 14:00 CRISPR these actually repeated sequences of DNA had been really speculated about and observed in the microbiological literature for decades but it wasn't till about 2012 right here at UC Berkeley when a team led by Jennifer Doudna and Emanuel sharp on ta discovered that they were involved in host immunity against a viral infection they found that when that viral DNA is taken up into the genome of the bacterium it's used to entrain a series of protein molecules that float around the cell surveilling for subsequent exposure to a viral DNA piece once that
• 14:00 - 14:30 viral DNA is put inside of the cell those protein surveillance molecules grab onto the DNA and destroy it effectively chopping it into bits it was our team of scientists at UC Berkeley that was able to see the potential of that surveillance molecule a programmable DNA cutting enzyme that they named cast 9 or CRISPR associated protein 9 now cast line is a programmable sequence-specific DNA cutting enzyme which means that it can find a specific point of DNA and cut it
• 14:30 - 15:00 so consider a leaf cell if you drill away into a leaf so you'll get down to its DNA code what cast line is able to do is sort of scan along that genome and find a specific point usually 18 to 22 letters long sort of like a control F function and then cut it in half sort of like a control X function shown a little bit more pictographic ly we can see that cast 9 essentially scans along the genome until it finds that very specific sequence to which it wasn't trained once
• 15:00 - 15:30 it finds that sequence it's able to pull the DNA apart cause a cut and essentially make a cleavage in both sides of that DNA so when you cut the genomes of living organisms lots of different things can happen but let's consider those two things that are most specific to agricultural improvement the first thing that you can do is use cassadine to create a mutation and so this is where we cut the DNA and delete alter or change the activity of an ax gene inside of that and under the current regulatory paradigm this is considered gene-editing
• 15:30 - 16:00 it's not really regulated as genetic modification the rationale behind this is that if I wanted to you know say create a mutation in a specific gene I could a take a thousand plants and irradiated them with gamma radiation or something similar to that or I can just take one plant and hit it with cast nine and do it a lot faster and less expensively and so essentially cast nine is just a more efficient way of producing site-specific mutations and that's one of the ways that we can use it the second way that we can use it is in a process called gene insertion and so that's where we supply a piece of
• 16:00 - 16:30 donor DNA along with our cast line that is able to actually fill that gap that's created by a DNA breakage event now in most cases this is used to insert a gene inside of the genome of living plants or it's used to kind of alter the activity of an existing gene but because we're supplying foreign DNA that's inserting itself into the genome this is considered true genetic modification and is regulated as such when you use this technique you produce a GMO or genetically modified organism now today
• 16:30 - 17:00 I hope that I can convince you at the both gene editing and genetic modification are safe practical and much more efficient than other breeding techniques but also that they'll be absolutely critical in meeting the needs of a growing population and then changing climate but first let's start with the food now we all eat food and I think a lot of people have very warranted skepticism about how genetic modification could be used because they're concerned about keeping their food nutritious and safe and it's my job as a plant scientist to tell you that
• 17:00 - 17:30 many of the tools that were using for genetic modification and the techniques that were applying are to really improve the nutrition and the safety of our food for human consumption I'm going to give you a few examples of that right now first let's consider Tomatoes now you like me might see this image of grocery store Tomatoes and kind of real backing your seeds and it's not because I don't love tomatoes in fact an heirloom tomato picked in the middle of summer is my absolute favorite fruit ever but it's not really in a popular opinion that most of the tomatoes that are sold in
• 17:30 - 18:00 the grocery store are cardboard II flavorless and lack a ton of nutrition compared to heirloom or wild tomato varieties the main reason for this is because over the past hundred years Tomatoes have been mostly bred to be harvested in industrial agricultural environments such that they've lost a lot of their flavor and a lot of their nutrition but what if we could use caste 9 and advanced breeding techniques to kind of redo that domestication process what if we could start with a flavorful and nutritious wild tomato and use caste 9
• 18:00 - 18:30 to domesticate it to make it more attractive for farmers two years ago one team showed that we could do just that they went back to basics and started with an undomesticated variety of wild tomato called solanum Pippin Ella folium solanum Pippin Olaf William is delicious when its fruits are very small and they grow on a huge bush which would never be attractive for farmers because it couldn't really fit in a field so they decided to use cast nine to mutagenize those genes that were most associated
• 18:30 - 19:00 with domestication to make those tomato plants attractive but still delicious in nutritious using Cassadine and mutagen izing just four genes our scientists were able to replicate a domestication process that took farmers thousands of years using conventional breeding by mutagen izing one gene they improve the architecture of that wild tomato plant turning it from a big Bush to a much more compact one that would be attractive to farmers with a second mutation they were able to increase the fruit number on that plant almost ten times with a third they were able to
• 19:00 - 19:30 increase the size of those fruits such as they looked much more like the ones that you could buy in the store today and with the fourth mutation they were able to improve the expression of lycopene a critical nutritious chemical that's found in most Tomatoes but has been lost in a lot of cultivated varieties that are sold in the store today at the end of all of this gene editing our scientists had produced a variety of tomato that looked very similar to the ones that are sold on the store today but it retained all of the flavor and nutrition of a wild tomato variety I think we can all agree that
• 19:30 - 20:00 this might be a really exciting application of gene editing but it could have implications far beyond crops like tomato consider orphan crops like cow pee yam millet and cassava crops like these are absolutely central to meeting the nutritional calories of billions of humans worldwide but by most standards they're relatively undomesticated which means that they have many favorable traits that makes them hard to grow and sometimes unattractive for consumers I ask that you consider just cassava I start to read vegetable that central to the diet of 40% of Africans
• 20:00 - 20:30 and is a staple for about 1.6 billion humans worldwide now as an orphan crop that means that cassava really hasn't received a lot of the same attention from crop readers and is by some standards undomesticated but cassava especially has a huge problem that problem is that cassava plants produce a cyanide containing compound inside of their roots which is like the true edible portion of cassava plants Kesava plants are also very Hardy so that means that in many parts of rural Africa when drought occurs cassava plants are the
• 20:30 - 21:00 only plants that stay alive and many people are forced to subsist on cassava unfortunately eating too much cassava can cause cassava cyanide poisoning causing a neurodegenerative disorder called konso konso means tied legs in the Congolese language of the Yaka people and it causes neurodegeneration of the legs and eventually full paralysis and paraplegic what's interesting about konso though and those cyanide compounds is that scientists perfectly understand how they're produced a team at UC Berkeley is
• 21:00 - 21:30 currently trying to use CRISPR cast 9 to knock out just two genes in the genome of cassava that would eliminate the production of cyanide and create a safe cassava variety for the developing world unfortunately the adoption of safe cassava crops in Africa might be a long time coming as many African governments feel the genetic modification and gene editing is unsafe frequently they're pressured by outside activists from Western countries that try and tell them this despite the fact that most scientists from those countries know that genetic modification is safe especially in the case of cassava it's
• 21:30 - 22:00 examples like this why it's absolutely critical that we signal the usefulness and safety of genetic modification for the people that need it the most so hopefully you see how CRISPR caste 9 can be a really valuable tool for improving orphan crops like cassava but I also want to point out that it could be a very valuable tool for improving crops that we grow here in the United States as well let's consider just wheat included now looking at a wheat seed here which is primarily what we make bread out of we can see that it's really significantly composed of this big
• 22:00 - 22:30 proteinaceous body called gluten now gluten is actually made up of two called gliadin and glutenin and many people find themselves being sensitive to one or both of these proteins for the majority of people that have celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity they're really sensitive to this gliadin protein which is able to pass through their intestinal lining triggering an autoimmune response that then degrades their intestinal lining over time this can be absolutely devastating for people and really it's been a focus of
• 22:30 - 23:00 conventional crop breeding for decades to try and remove gliadin from the genomes of wheat to prevent this reaction from happening unfortunately conventional breeding has been really unsuccessful at trying to get the gene for glidin out of the genome of wheat and the reason for this is because any one variety of wheat can have forty five to a hundred different copies of that gliadin gene meaning that it would take hundreds or thousands of years to breed out all of those genes that were responsible for producing Glyde fortunately for humans castithan provides a really effective means for
• 23:00 - 23:30 eliminating gliadin from the genome one study that was published two years ago targeted a caste line molecule to all 45 different versions of glidin inside of the genome for wheat this was actually pretty easy because all glidin genes have a sequence in common that can be targeted with caste 9 what they found is that they were able to actually mutate or entirely delete most versions of glidin from that genome and as a result produced a wheat variety that produced almost no glide at Gaiden what's perhaps most fascinating about this study is that that CRISPR mutant which had lost
• 23:30 - 24:00 most of its functional gliadin genes looked just the same as conventional wheat it grew just the same amount of seed and the seed looked just about the same but really critically those CRISPR mutants showed an 85 percent decrease in predicted immunogenicity they retained all their bread making qualities and most of the nutritional profile but they showed a significantly reduced immune response in celiac and gluten sensitive patients now it's poor it important to point out that making a glide and free
• 24:00 - 24:30 safer version of wheat is totally possible through conventional breeding but it would take hundreds of thousands of years and the result would be just the same as if we had used CRISPR Castine and accomplished it in a few months I hope this is a compelling argument for how CRISPR Castine and gene editing can be a really useful tool in improving our crops to make noria Tricia's and more delicious now I'd like to talk about genetic modification with regards to farms and farmers now I do a lot of agricultural outreach here in the City of Berkeley and in the greater Bay Area and the
• 24:30 - 25:00 critique of genetic modification that I hear the most is that it takes power away from farmers and puts it in the hands of multinational seed corporations now I'm not gonna have time to talk about that in fall today and I do believe that companies like Monsanto and Syngenta do deserve to be held accountable for the mistakes that they made in the past but today I want to talk about a new vision I want to talk about how GE and GM can be used to empower farmers transform agricultural production systems and protect our society's most vulnerable people now one of the main ways that scientists like me
• 25:00 - 25:30 are using gene editing and genetic modification to help farmers is by breeding new varieties of plants that are resistant to fungal bacterial and insect pests let's consider just one of those pests shown here the fungus Fusarium head blight now Fusarium head blight takes out about 30 million metric tons of wheat every single year and accounts for about 5.6 billion dollars of lost revenue mostly for American and Canadian farmers now if you serum headlight is pretty unsavory for two reasons one because it can soil crops
• 25:30 - 26:00 but also two because it produces a really nasty chemical toxin called vomit a toxin I'll let you kind of use your imagination to figure out what the effects of almeda toxin are but suffice to say it's a really devastating toxin produced by Fusarium head blight that is pretty nasty for humans and livestock what's interesting about Fusarium though is that it's a problem much bigger than wheat and in fact most species of grasses that we know of are in one way or another susceptible to Fusarium that is with one notable exception the genus
• 26:00 - 26:30 than a pie room or wheatgrass which is a relatively undomesticated relative to wild wheat if you look at the NAP I arm side-by-side with wheat they actually have a ton in common their leaves look really similar their grain looks very similar they flower in similar times and in similar ways and actually they're so genetically similar that they can actually breed with each other they can form a viable hybrid this would be kind of similar if you took a Labrador and a poodle and bred them by by each other that you could actually have a viable offspring bored of that but there's one really really notable difference between
• 26:30 - 27:00 dennah Byram and wheat and that's that then Parham has a gene called f HB 7 f HB 7 is a protein that's able to efficiently detoxify vomited toxin making thin appearan of li immune to force areum headblade now f HB 7 is a genetic oddity it's the only gene that we know of in plants that's able to detoxify of on meta toxin which made scientists ask the question how come thin a parm is the only species that has this gene where did it come from they found the answer and it came from the roots so plants just like URI
• 27:00 - 27:30 maintain a really complex ecology of microorganisms that live inside of them you know we have bacteria and fungi and all sorts of weird stuff that live inside of our gut that help us digest our food and engage with things and bolster our immune system and very similarly plants have a very rich ecology of microorganisms that live in their guts their roots and then a pie room is really no exception in fact it maintains a whole network of friendly fungal interactions with fungi that live in and around its root cells in a
• 27:30 - 28:00 stunning display of molecular forensics one team of scientists was able to show that that FHB 7 gene which detoxifies vomit a toxin 5 million years ago was passed from one of those fungi into the genome of thin of Hiram this very specific evolutionary event is the reason that all living species of ten appear have assistance to Fusarium head blight today but what if we could take that gene and passage it into another organism into the wheat that we lose so much of de Fusarium head blight our scientists that did this molecular
• 28:00 - 28:30 forensics thought to do just this they passed that F HB 7 into wheat and what they found was holistic and broad-spectrum resistance to Fusarium head blight this story is amazing because it shows how a gene was passed from fungus to grass - grass and in each organism was able to confer a very specific tolerance to vomit a toxin now what I love about the FHP 7 story is that it really shows that the transmission of genes from one organism to the other is a natural process we'd just like then Apeiron has all sorts of
• 28:30 - 29:00 fungi that live in its roots and it's very conceivable that the F HB 7 from those fungi could be passed into wheat but were we to just sit around and wait for that to happen we'd probably wait you know several hundreds of thousands of years whereas if we use cast iron we can accomplish it in a sane generation not only will genetic modification and gnna and be really critical for feeding generations to come the things that we want to do with gene editing really aren't that dissimilar from things that happen in the natural world now one of the main questions that I get asked doing agricultural outreach
• 29:00 - 29:30 time and time again is why are farmers so beholden to seed corporations don't plants produce seed such that farmers wouldn't have to buy seed every single year now the answer to that question is complex and multifaceted but a lot of it boils down to a genetic phenomenon called hybrid vigor hybrid vigor works a little bit like this let's say that you have two elite cultivars of rice from different parts on the earth let's say that one is from Africa and one is from Asia now usually elite cultivars have been
• 29:30 - 30:00 inbred for many many generations and while they have really nice agronomic traits as a result of this they've really lost a lot of genetic diversity but now let's say the youtai decide to breed those two varieties by one another and what you find is that the offspring or progeny of those two is actually much higher yielding much less susceptible to pests and much more tolerant of drought and other stresses this is due to a phenomenon called hybrid vigor or heterosis but there's an unfortunate part of hybrid vigor that when you breed
• 30:00 - 30:30 into the next generation much of those traits are lost and the offspring of hybrids look very much like the parents that bore the hybrid in the first place so the reason that so many farmers have to buy seed every single year is that frequently they're buying hybrid seed from seed companies plants that will retain the traits of a hybrid plant for a single generation and then become pretty useless by modern-day standards now capturing hybrid vigor that is producing a plant variety that is able to stay a hybrid for multiple generations has been an ambition of biologists and genetic engineers for
• 30:30 - 31:00 decades but no one was successful until the use of cast nine last year in 2019 a team at UC Davis use cast nine to systematically modify a few key developmental genes responsible for rice reproduction what they had produced was a variety of rice that could produce an offspring without having to be pollinated it could effectively clone itself through successive generations what this would mean for the rice industry is that you by a hybrid crop and it would clone
• 31:00 - 31:30 itself into successive generations and remain a hybrid still hanging on to those nice hybrid vigor traits the discovery of plants that clone themselves and the CRISPR caste mediated gene editing techniques to do it have blown the doors off of agriculture soft cloning plants have long been considered the holy grail of agriculture and these techniques will be groundbreaking if we can transfer them to other staple crops like wheat or corn stable hybrid lands will be really great for scientists like me because it'll really accelerate our breeding efforts being able to work in a
• 31:30 - 32:00 stable hybrid lines that means that we can really work in a relevant genetic context when we're trying to improve traits in plants but most importantly stable hybrid lines will be great for farmers while self cloning rice really isn't on the market yet once it will be it'll mean that more people can buy a leaf varieties of rice because it won't be so expensive to have to buy seed for multiple years this reduction in cost will be especially important for farmers that wouldn't otherwise be able to afford hybrid lines which will be a really important thing in the developing world as the agronomic demand increases
• 32:00 - 32:30 now improved pest resistance and soft cloning plants I think are two great examples that illustrate how scientists are trying to develop new ways to empower farmers and to make farming a more inexpensive practical and efficient pursuit perhaps most importantly of them gene editing will facilitate the introduction of low input agriculture if we can make plants that are drought tolerant and pest tolerant and better at nutrient allocation with gene editing that means that farmers have to use less water fertilizer and pesticide fundamentally putting fewer chemicals
• 32:30 - 33:00 into the environment now in this way gene editing might be our most important asset when it comes to curbing emissions in the agricultural sector so now that we've talked about some very conventional topics in agriculture food safety nutrition you know farming practices I wanted to take a minute to just kind of speculate about the shape of plants to come how we might be using engineered plants in the future to meet the new problems that society is facing now one can only imagine how humans first felt when they venture deep into the Brazilian rainforest and discovered
• 33:00 - 33:30 glowing mushrooms the species that you see before you right now is jnana thapa's namby which is the species endemic to Central and South America now mushrooms like Nina thapa's Nambi have fascinating biologists and right now we currently understand that they glow at night so as to attract bugs that will spread their spores around the forest floor but it's hopeful just a long time to figure out the actual genetic mechanism of their autofluorescence amazingly fungal autofluorescence is encoded by just four genes and after a
• 33:30 - 34:00 several decades of research scientists were able to identify and get the DNA sequence of all of those four genes in a groundbreaking study that was just published this past year a team of Russian scientists transferred four of those genes and put it into a tobacco plants into a tobacco plant excuse me and the results were extraordinary tobacco plants that fully glow in the dark without the addition of excess chemical energy so these results speak for themselves and personally I cannot wait until I have a plant night light in my home but I bring up these glowing
• 34:00 - 34:30 plants to make a bigger point I don't think that these are the most interesting manifestation of genetic modification in in plants and I think the gene editing will do a lot cooler things in our lifetime but these propose a new paradigm in which plants are able to be used for tools to solve big human problems for example what if you could get a glowing plant that only glowed when exposed to an environmental pollutant what if you could get a plant that could clean up an oil spill or remove pollutants from a soil what if you could generate new fuels efficiently from sunlight what if you could use the roots of a plant to desalinate water and
• 34:30 - 35:00 what if you could mass-produce medicine like insulin or a covert vaccine in the leaf of a plant fundamentally Nature has made millions of interesting chemistry's and behaviors that are useful to us humans that we could put to use for us in the leaf of a plant and finally what if plants can help us solve the biggest problem our society will face in the coming generations now not only is this a huge problem it's very near and dear to my heart because this is what my research deals in if you look at this graph this charts atmospheric co2 levels
• 35:00 - 35:30 over the past 100,000 years on the earth what we can see is that as the result of industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels co2 levels in our atmosphere have precipitously increased in the past 200 years now what this will mean for our environment is immense habitat destruction deforestation and really rising temperatures that will be bad for Humanity but what if we could use plans to help solve that problem now plants of course co2 out of the air through photosynthesis and convert it into living matter pretty much everything
• 35:30 - 36:00 that you see around you whether it's your skin that leaves on a tree or fungus on the soil is made from co2 that at one point was pulled out of the air by a plant but in the photosynthesis Department though plants do the most photosynthesis they're not exactly the most efficient consider algae and photosynthetic bacteria or cyanobacteria these are the close relatives and even distant ancestors of most plants that we see on land today interestingly because these guys have been doing photosynthesis for so long they've grown incredibly efficient at it and actually
• 36:00 - 36:30 they're much more efficient at taking carbon dioxide out of the air than most plants a lot of this is owed to biochemical and biophysical mechanisms called carbon concentrating mechanisms here we see a bacterial carbon concentrating mechanism where the cell essentially packages all of its carbon fixation machinery into a big pertinacious icosahedron shell shown on the right and then surrounds it by a bunch of pumps that pump carbon dioxide towards that shell so it can be more efficiently captured and converted into biomass as a result of carbon
• 36:30 - 37:00 concentrating mechanisms bacteria and algae are actually much more efficient at photosynthesis specifically carbon capture than plants so this makes scientists like me wonder what if we could put those mechanisms inside of the leaf of a plant what if a plant could be taking out more co2 from the air and converting it into more useful things like medicine or food now solutions like this might only play a small role into how our society responds to climate change but even marginally improving carbon fixation and agriculture could have huge benefits for Humanity and I really hope that this
• 37:00 - 37:30 illustrates to you that by drawing examples from other parts of nature we can really improve plants for human good so today I hope that I was able to convince you that agricultural crop improvement is still an active process and that the tools that we have today aren't unnatural or unsafe but instead just accelerated means to improve the sustainability nutrition flavor safety and overall agronomic usefulness of the crops that we grow for food I also hope that I was able to convince you that scientists like me are absolutely
• 37:30 - 38:00 concerned with the interests of the people that grow our food and the most vulnerable people in our society that have to live off of subsistence farming finally I hope that I was in part and to inspire your imagination about how engineering plants is gonna offer really exciting unique and scalable solutions to some of the toughest challenges our society will face in the coming decades now as the Sun sets on this presentation and the Sun literally sets all around me I wanted to make just one last point and it starts with this image this is a
• 38:00 - 38:30 photograph taken in the 1890s in the United States and what it shows is a team of dozens of horses pulling a piece of agricultural equipment now nowadays horse based agriculture seems entirely impractical horses have long since been replaced by tractors but in the period following World War one Americans had a very different perspective as mechanization slowly was replacing the jobs of labor animals heated political debates were ensuing arguing the tractors were unnatural and inhumane one lobby group called the horse Association of America even sprung up and spent the
• 38:30 - 39:00 better part of the 1920s in the 1930s spreading fear and propaganda and going around the entire United States talking about the march of machinery and the scourge the tractors brought to agricultural life these tensions around agricultural mechanization really came to a head at the 1921 national implement and vehicle Association Show in Fargo North Dakota at the show a tractor was pitted against a team of 60 horses to see who could faster prepare a 10 acre seed bed in sweltering 100-degree June heat perhaps not so surprising to us
• 39:00 - 39:30 today the tractor smoked the horses and not only did it be win by a landslide actually five out of the 60 horses died of heatstroke I think stories like this are a really good allegory for genetically modified crops because in most cases genetically modified crops are safer more efficient better for farmers and significantly more humane than those bred with conventional agriculture but just like people were stubborn to horses being transitioned out of agriculture so are people stubborn about the introduction of genetically modified crops into our
• 39:30 - 40:00 food supply and I think that this brings up an important point and that's that change in agriculture is really hard riotous public debate has coincided with almost every transition in agricultural history whether it be the transition from oxen to horses or the transition from manure to fertilizer which is why it's important that we communicate to everyone that this technology is not only critical for meeting the needs of our growing population but it's say but I don't ask that you just take my word for it I'm just one scientist and science is a community effort instead
• 40:00 - 40:30 defer to almost every major scientific organization on the earth like the World Health Organization or the National Academy of Sciences who have all concluded that incontrovertibly genetic modification is safe for consumption it's these same organizations that you trust with regards to climate change and vaccine safety quite simply the opposition to GMO stands with blatant disregard to the evidence and a growing scientific consensus suggest that GM will be one of the best tools that we have in meeting the needs of our growing planet now this doesn't mean that reasonable people can't disagree about
• 40:30 - 41:00 specific agricultural practices or how we might use gene editing but our global situation necessitates that we reshape the argument about GMO not to be about if we should use it but about how so I'll leave you with just one last point and that's that fundamentally you as an American consumer will never face the need to eat GMO but that's an immense point of privilege mind you I dream of a world where you would be so attracted to eating GMO whether it's more nutritious and more delicious that you would want to do that but American agricultural
• 41:00 - 41:30 output will be never as affected as the rest of the world by climate change but the world is looking at us as an example when it comes to agricultural development when we oppose GMO whether it's in our legislature or on our food labels we tell people that need this technology that it isn't safe which science tells us is just not true to oppose GMO is to let the vague and largely unfounded fears the few stifle the prosperity and the livelihood of the many now I hope today of excited your
• 41:30 - 42:00 imagination about the coming good in our world giving you tools to understand this coming age and imbued your trust in this brave world to come and the scientists that are working to make it happen thank you so much for your attention this has been an immense blast and I am really excited to follow up with you all in the chat bar thank you to Wonder fest again please hit me up we'd love to talk to you after the fact if you want to email me or tweet at me or check out the other stuff that I'm doing thank you so much for your attention goodbye
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