Brazil
September 5, 2022
Stage of the research carried out in tissue culture to regenerate and select plants that were edited via CRISPR - Photo: ANeto/Arquivo Embrapa
In an extraordinary meeting on September 1st, the National Technical Commission on Biosafety (CTNBio) considered that the editing of the soybean genome, conducted by Embrapa with the CRISPR technique to deactivate some anti-nutritional factors, results in conventional (non-transgenic) soybeans. The opinion was based on the Normative Resolution No. 16 and considered that the edited plant does not have the presence of the DNA of another species, which makes the product non-GMO. "This approval by CTNBio is a great achievement, because, when the soybeans are considered non-GMO, there is no need to conduct the complex process of commercial deregulation of a GMO product. Thus, commercial release is faster, reducing costs and facilitating the entry of products into the market with guaranteed biosafety", Alexandre Nepomuceno, the General Head of Embrapa Soybeans, celebrates.
In Embrapa Soybeans' laboratories, the researchers used the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) precision gene editing technique to deactivate the anti-nutritional factor lectin in the DNA of a highly productive soybean cultivar. "With this punctual and precise alteration in the DNA of soybeans, we were able to imitate some processes that exist in nature itself, but that could take a long time to be obtained by other techniques, such as classical breeding", Nepomuceno explains.
Some anti-nutritional factors of soybeans, which are used as a protein component of animal feed and even in human food, hinder the digestibility and absorption of nutrients, especially in monogastric animals, whose stomachs have reduced storage capacity, such as pigs and chickens. "As a result, the use of soybeans depends on thermal processing that inactivates these anti-nutritional factors, but increases the cost of production", Embrapa Soybeans' researcher Liliane Henning, one of the study’s coordinators, explains. "Our expectation with these developed plants is not only to guarantee the nutritional quality of soybeans, but also to potentially enable cost reduction in the use of soybeans for animal feed", Liliane says.
From now on, Embrapa can introduce this desired genetic characteristic in its other cultivars adapted to the different producing regions in Brazil. However, the modification made in the soybean DNA has already been carried out in a highly productive variety. "If classic breeding had been used, it would have taken 10 to 12 years to obtain the same characteristics introduced into a productive variety. With the CRISPR technique, this was done in six months and, after confirming the phenotype (presence of the desired characteristic), the edited variety is ready to be registered and commercialized", the researcher highlights.
Legislation and biotechnology
According to Nepomuceno, CTNBio's opinion for the new soybeans is relevant, as it increases the possibility that public research institutions of even small and medium-scale companies develop biotechnology-based solutions that can truly become innovations in the market.
According to the researcher, Brazil has been following the same understanding of countries such as the United States, Canada, Argentina, Japan, Australia, Chile and Colombia: a more assertive legislation with regard to the use of biotechnology in agriculture, especially in the use of gene editing techniques such as CRISPR.
Nepomuceno points out that gene editing often mimics natural or already established processes, such as that of classical genetic improvement. This corroborates the understanding of international regulatory agencies to consider the edited organisms as conventional. "This perception is allowing a democratization of the use of biotechnology in agriculture, which allows more companies to participate, bring solutions and add values to agribusiness", he explains.
New studies
The Embrapa Soybeans team also highlights that soy gene editing, through CRISPR technology, has been used at the Decentralized Unit to create plants with the deactivation of other anti-nutritional factors (trypsin inhibitors, for example), improvement of oil quality and also in the activation of native soy genes involved in increasing drought tolerance.
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