Safety of Genome Edited Crops

What is genome editing?

Genome editing was first developed in the 1990s and has gained prominence in recent years, with wide-ranging applications in agriculture, medicine, and environmental remediation. It refers to a set of modern biotechnology tools used by scientists to make precise changes in an organism’s DNA, also known as the genome. This is akin to how you would edit a document on your computer by deleting, replacing, or adding a more suitable word.

Genome editing tools can be viewed as molecular scissors that cut DNA strands, causing the strands to break. The cells are able to repair the cuts and the repaired DNA is sometimes slightly different from the original sequence. While small breaks in DNA naturally happen in all organisms, genome editing tools allow scientists to direct where the cuts happen!

In the food and agriculture sector, genome editing allows crop developers to make precise changes in the existing DNA of a crop to impart useful properties. On the one hand, these changes can be small and do not introduce foreign DNA. The resulting genome edited crop is equivalent to crops found naturally or bred using conventional breeding techniques. On the other hand, genome editing can introduce foreign DNA into a crop – the resulting crop is equivalent to a genetically modified crop.