Wednesday, September 01, 2021

First trial of gene-edited wheat in the United Kingdom

Good news! Brexit has its advantages!

Did you know that baking or toasting wheat bread becomes carcinogen? 

"Scientists have been given the green light to grow the UK’s first field trial of gene-edited wheat.

Rothamsted Research announced on Thursday (24 August) that its application to run a series of field trials had been approved by Defra.

The first field trials of CRISPR-edited wheat anywhere in the UK or Europe will be planted at the Hertfordshire-based research institute this autumn.

Researchers have used gene editing (GE) to develop a wheat with a reduced cancer-causing compound commonly found in toast.

The wheat has been edited to reduce levels of the naturally occurring amino acid, asparagine, which is converted to the carcinogenic processing contaminant, acrylamide, when bread is baked or toasted.

Acrylamide has been proven to cause cancer in rats and mice and it is a likely carcinogenic in humans.

The amount of acrylamide in bread is relatively low, but it increases many times over when bread is toasted. ...
During development in the lab, researchers “knocked out” the asparagine synthetase gene, TaASN2.

Asparagine concentrations in the grain of the edited plants were substantially reduced compared with unedited plants, with one line showing a more than 90 % reduction ...

Outside of the EU ... the UK was now free to make its own decisions based on the science ... to move away from EU restrictions that currently treat gene editing the same as genetic modification (GM). ..."

Rothamsted gets green light to trial gene-edited wheat - Farmers Weekly

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