Research
CRISPR, one tool with the potential to change our world Authors: Laurence D. Melton¹ and Andrew C. Allan²,³ 1
School of Chemical Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland
2
Plant & Food Research, Mt Albert, Auckland
3
School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland
Fig 1. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, 2020 Nobel Prize winners in chemistry
Introduction Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna (Fig.1) were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2020. This is the first time that two women have shared a Nobel Prize, by itself an important milestone. Their research on CRISPR-based gene editing heralds a new era in the biological sciences including food science. CRISPR has the potential to cure life-threatening hereditary diseases such as cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, while also targeting some breast, ovarian, prostate and stomach cancers. Aside from its use in medicine, CRISPR can be applied to plants, animals, bacteria and fungi. If used in plant breeding, CRISPR-directed changes to the genome can generate new higher yielding wheat, rice and corn, to help feed the world’s burgeoning population. Gene editing can be used to produce disease resistant plants and animals, and facilitate production of plant proteins as meat 12
Food New Zealand
substitutes. Nutrition is improved by targeted breeding of pigs with less fat and cooking oils with less saturated fat, or tomatoes with higher levels of Vitamin A. Heat and drought tolerant crops and animals will assist in dealing with global warming.
What is CRISPR? CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”) stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”. At the core of CRISPR are pieces of RNA, which are commonly loaded into an enzyme (a DNAcutter) called Cas9. The role of the CRISPR system in nature is to protect bacteria from viruses. Bacteria that survive a viral infection keep part of the viral DNA, which is stored in the bacterial genome between CRISPR sequence repeats. If the same virus invades again, the bacteria have
