How Could CRISPR Improve Agriculture?

Researchers are using CRISPR technology to make everything from coffee that grows decaffeinated to bulls without hazardous horns. Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/crispr-innovations-news.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren Bola bam Here. Back in September, we
did an episode about Crisper, the genetic engineering tool that's
based on how bacteria protect themselves from viruses. Often compared
to a pair of molecular scissors. Crisper uses specialized proteins

(00:22):
called casts a short for Crisper associated enzymes to cut
strands of DNA or RNA at a precise, preprogrammed location.
Then the system can insert or remove the desired gene
at that site, and while a gene edited organism. Today,
we wanted to talk about a few ways that the

(00:43):
technology is being experimented with, for example, growing spicy tomatoes
and decaf coffee beans. Imagine biting into a vine ripened tomato.
What flavors come to mind? Sweet? Bright? Maybe a little savory?
What about spice? See Thanks to an international team of geneticists,

(01:03):
that might be the future flavor profile of some tomatoes.
Researchers in Brazil and Ireland have proposed Crisper as a
means of activating dormant capsaiusnoid jeans in tomato plants. The
same genetic sequence that gives chilies their kick. In addition
to creating the perfect bloody Mary, the plants promise an
economical alternative to traditional peppers, which are notoriously tricky to grow.

(01:29):
Crisper can also offer a boost to your daily breakfast routine,
or rather take the boost away. A United Kingdom company
is currently developing a coffee bean engineered to grow caffeine free.
That's a big deal because today's coffee beans have to
be chemically decaffeinated, usually by soaking them an ethyl acetate
or methylene chloride. This harsh chemical bath strips out both

(01:52):
the beans caffeine and some of their flavor. Crisper Coffee
promises a jitter free cup of Joe with all the
roasty goodness of full cat. But what about no hangover wine.
If you've ever wished you could have a night out
on the town without suffering a head splitting hangover the
next morning, you might be in luck. A team of

(02:12):
scientists at the University of Illinois have used their genetic
scissors to boost the health benefits of a strain of
yeast that's used to ferment wine, and they've snipped out
the genes responsible for next day headaches. Zacora mices sarah
de si a. The yeast in question is a polyploid organism,
meaning that it has many copies of every gene, as
opposed to the sometimes usual too. This feature makes the

(02:36):
yeast both highly adaptable and extremely difficult to genetically engineer
using older methods, which could only target one copy of
a gene at a time, But Crisper allows genetic engineers
to cut across every single version of a gene in
one go. Using it, the Illinois team was able to
boost the amount of heart healthy resveratrol in their wine

(02:56):
while leaving the hangover on the cutting room floor. Of course,
altering plants is one thing. What about animals. Let's look
at the thorny case of horns and cattle. When it
comes to cattle farming, horns are usually a no go
on a fully grown bull. They pose danger to the farmer,
the other cattle, and occasionally to the animal itself. Traditionally,

(03:21):
farm raised cattle are d horned by annihilating the horn
producing cells on the animal's forehead, located on two bony
proturbances called horn buds. The buds are destroyed by one
of several different painful means by cutting them out with
knives or by applying hot irons, electricity, or caustic substances

(03:41):
like sodium hydroxide. These practices can sometimes lead to facial
disfigurement or eye damage, but crisper might just offer a
more ethical alternative. Using crisper, scientists of engineered a gene
for hornlessness in cattle, effectively eliminating the need for horn
removal process in those animals. Even more interestingly, some of

(04:03):
these gene edited bulls have been able to pass the
trade onto their offspring, which is crucial for keeping the
trade in population circulation in scientific circles. This has been
seen as a potentially huge success story. Historically, the general
public has had less enthusiasm for gene tweaked crops and livestock,

(04:23):
although recent research suggests that those attitudes may be changing.
But what if crisper were used for something a little
less Charlotte's Web and a little more Jurassic Park. Perhaps
the most far out used for crisper at the moment
is its potential to bring back entire species from the dead,
and right now there's serious talk about resurrecting one particular species,

(04:46):
the passenger pigeon. Passenger pigeons used to rove the forests
of North America in flocks hundreds of millions strong, darkening
the skies and thundering through woods and what conservationist although
Leopold described as a feathered tempest. However, that started to
change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as European colonists

(05:07):
radiated across the continent. In addition to being ubiquitous, passenger
pigeons had the unfortunate quality of being delicious. They were
hunted in mass by hungry euro Americans, both for food
and sport. This probably wouldn't have been as devastating to
the bird's total population, except the colonists simultaneously destroyed much

(05:27):
of their nesting grounds. This brutal combination drove the species
into steep decline by the early twenty century. The last
known passenger pigeon, a bird named Martha, died in captivity
in nineteen fourteen. Now scientists are looking to crisper as
a way to bring these iconic birds back. A California

(05:47):
based biotech organization called Revive and Restore has a dedicated
passenger pigeon project, which aims to re establish the species
by modifying the genome of the closely related band tailed pigeon.
If successful, the group says they could use this approach
to resurrect all kinds of extinct or critically endangered creatures,
from the black footed ferret to the wooly mammoth. Whether

(06:09):
or not they should is, of course, still a matter
of some debate, but there's no denying that Crisper has
brought stuff of science fiction into the realm of the
potentially possible. Today's episode is based on the article spicy
Tomatoes hangover proof Wine. Is there anything Crisper Can't do?

(06:30):
On how Stuff Works dot Com? Written by Joanna Thompson.
Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership
with how stuff Works dot Com, and it is produced
by Tyler Clay. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio
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