The gene-editing tool CRISPR will help the world cope with climate change by producing crops and livestock better-suited to hotter, drier, or wetter conditions, reports MIT Technology Review:
Many more CRISPR-edited plants and animals are on the way, and a number of them were altered to promote traits that could help them survive or thrive in conditions fueled by climate change, beginning to fulfill one long-standing promise of genetic engineering. That includes the offspring of two cattle that Acceligen, a Minnesota-based precision breeding business, edited to have shorter coats better suited to hotter temperatures. In 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration determined that meat and other products from those cattle “pose low risk to people, animals, the food supply, and the environment” and can be marketed for sale to American consumers.
Other companies are harnessing CRISPR to develop corn with shorter, stronger stalks that could reduce the loss of crops to increasingly powerful storms; novel cover crops that can help sequester more carbon dioxide and produce biofuels; and animals that could resist zoonotic diseases that climate change may be helping to spread, including avian influenza….
IGI is working to develop rice that can withstand drier conditions, as well as crops that may suck up and store away more carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas driving climate change. Older genetic modification techniques, which involve moving genes from one organism into another, have already delivered agricultural blockbusters, including crops that are resistant to herbicides and corn, potatoes, and soybeans with enhanced protections against pests.
CRISPR is also helping treat severe auto-immune diseases. “One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells,” reports Nature.
Gene therapy has also ended the years of excruciating pain suffered by a boy with sickle-cell disease.
It also has restored vision in some people with inherited blindness.
An English toddler has had her hearing restored in a pioneering gene therapy trial: “Opal Sandy was born unable to hear anything due to auditory neuropathy, a condition that disrupts nerve impulses traveling from the inner ear to the brain and can be caused by a faulty gene. But after receiving an infusion containing a working copy of the gene during groundbreaking surgery that took just 16 minutes, the 18-month-old can hear almost perfectly and enjoys playing with toy drums.”
A new gene therapy blocks the painful hereditary condition angiodema.
A genetically-modified chicken lays eggs that people allergic to eggs can eat. Scientists have genetically engineered a cow that produces human insulin in its milk.
Genetic engineering recently produced pork that people who are allergic to pork can eat.
