Tag: gmo

Florida Approves Release of Billions of GMO Mosquitoes

Overlooking potential public health risks, lingering scientific questions, and deficient public data, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS) approved the extension of Oxitec’s two-year field trial on Wednesday, which includes releasing several billion more genetically engineered (GE) mosquitoes into the Florida Keys — one of Florida’s most ecologically sensitive areas.

FDACS’ approval comes on the heels of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granting the British biotechnology company Oxitec a two-year extension for its Experimental Use Permit for the release of a GE version of the species Aedes aegypti across Monroe County, Florida.

“FDACS should have required Oxitec to cease claiming as ‘confidential business information’ their data on the human health and environmental effects of the release of the mosquitoes,” said Jaydee Hanson, Policy Director at Center for Food Safety. “In Spain, when Oxitec withheld the data, the Spanish government told Oxitec to make public the health and environmental safety effects of their genetically engineered insect. Florida should have done the same. Moreover, FDACS should not have allowed a second major release without making public the data from the first trial and having it reviewed by unbiased scientists in the field.”

FDACS’ approval came despite unresolved public health and environmental concerns raised by scientists, public health experts and environmental groups about potential impacts of the release. The data from Florida’s 2021 field trial release of genetically engineered mosquitoes in the Florida Keys still has not been made public or reviewed by independent scientists.

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Forget extinction: U.S. company plans to bring back wooly mammoths

Wooly mammoths might be making a comeback thanks to Colossal Biosciences of the great state of Texas.

The Dallas-based company says it plans to take on the environmental issues that led to critical endangerment and perform the once seemingly impossible task of reviving long-extinct species.

Colossal announced it will pioneer the use of CRISPR technology along with other genome engineering technologies toward a practical working model of de-extinction initially focused on its long-term goals of successful restoration and rewilding of functional woolly mammoths, large proboscideans from the Ice Age, to the tundra, according to a press release.

It said genetic engineering applications expand beyond animals and have the potential to advance human health, enhance food production, reduce environmental impact, and optimize animal health and welfare.

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Mosquitoes With Synthetic DNA Scheduled For California Release

In the mosquito breeding rooms of British biotech company Oxitec, scientists line up fresh eggs, each the size of a grain of salt. Using microscopic needles, the white-coated researchers inject each egg with a dab of a proprietary synthetic DNA.

For four days, Oxitec technicians care for the eggs, watching for those that hatch into wriggling brown larvae. Those “injection survivors,” as the company calls them, face a battery of tests to ensure their genetic modification is successful.

Soon, millions of these engineered mosquitoes could be set loose in California in an experiment recently approved by the federal government.

Oxitec, a private company, says its genetically modified bugs could help save half the world’s population from the invasive Aedes aegypti mosquito, which can spread diseases such as yellow fever, chikungunya and dengue to humans. Female offspring produced by these modified insects will die, according to Oxitec’s plan, causing the population to collapse.

“Precise. Environmentally sustainable. Non-toxic,” the company says on its website of its product trademarked as the “Friendly” mosquito.

Scientists independent from the company and critical of the proposal say not so fast. They say unleashing the experimental creatures into nature has risks that haven’t yet been fully studied, including possible harm to other species or unexpectedly making the local mosquito population harder to control.

Even scientists who see the potential of genetic engineering are uneasy about releasing the transgenic insects into neighborhoods because of how hard such trials are to control.

“There needs to be more transparency about why these experiments are being done,” said Natalie Kofler, a bioethicist at Harvard Medical Schoolwho has followed the company’s work. “How are we weighing the risks and benefits?”

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Beef from gene-hacked ‘super cows’ can now be sold in the US

You could soon be eating genetically modified beef thanks to the US Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA claims that two gene-edited breeds of beef cattle produced by a major breeder are safe for human consumption.

The two breeds of cow in question have been edited so they grow short slick coats.

This change is not thought to be harmful to the meat or the cow.

Experts suggest this genetic modification is “low risk”.

That means Acceligen, the company which produces the breed, doesn’t need to seek approval to sell it.

This is said to be the first time that the FDA has made such an assessment.

The federal agency has never given a “low-risk” premarket approval before to a gene-edited animal food product.

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Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Set to Be Released in California and Florida

Millions of genetically modified mosquitoes are set to be released in California and Florida in an effort to reduce the number of real, disease-carrying invasive mosquitoes.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Monday approved use of the genetically engineered insects in pilot projects in specific districts across both states.

The mosquitoes were made by UK-based biotechnology firm Oxitec, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in an effort to combat insect-borne diseases such as dengue fever, yellow fever, and the Zika virus.

According to Oxitec, its “sustainable and targeted biological pest control technology does not harm beneficial insects like bees and butterflies and is proven to control the disease-transmitting Aedes aegypti mosquito, which has invaded communities in Florida, California, and other U.S. states.”

Since it was first detected in California in 2013, the Aedes aegypti mosquito has spread rapidly to more than 20 counties throughout the state, increasing the risk of mosquito-borne diseases being transmitted to humans.

Oxitec’s new technology consists of genetically-modified male mosquitoes, which do not bite, that will be released into the wild where they are expected to mate with females, which do bite.

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Mexico to Replace 16 Million Tons of GMO Corn with Native Maize

In addition to banning Monsanto/Bayer’s cancer-causing Roundup herbicide by 2024, Mexico is now pledging to rid the country of GMO corn by the same date.

To do so, it plans to gradually replace 16 million tons in annual imports of GMO corn from the United States with ancient, indigenous varieties.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador first made the decree on January 2, noting that bio-security authorities would “revoke and refrain from granting permits for the release of genetically modified corn seeds into the environment.”

Following through with that promise, Mexican health safety regulators just denied a permit for Monsanto/Bayer’s latest GMO corn variety last month.

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GMO tomato as edible COVID vaccine? Mexican scientists work to make it a reality

While large companies and public sector consortiums in the United States, Canada, China and Europe are running at full speed to develop a vaccine grown in genetically modified (GM) tobacco plants, a research group at a Mexican university is working toward the same objective, but with a different and innovative strategy. They are using bioinformatics and computational genetic engineering to identify candidate antigens for a vaccine that can be expressed in tomato plants. Eating the fruit from these plants would then confer immunity against COVID-19.

At the time I write these lines, there are already more than 3.6 million people reportedly infected by the COVID19 pandemic and some 252,000 deaths globally. In the US, which has the world’s highest rate of infection, COVID-19 deaths have surpassed deaths from cancer, coronary heart disease and even influenza/pneumonia in just the few  months since the novel coronavirus arrived.

This critical situation has led the entire world to embark on a real race to develop a vaccine that immunizes the population against this new strain of coronavirus, which apparently emerged in the autumn of 2019 in China. So far, more than 100 vaccines are being investigated for COVID-19 by universities, public research centers and especially private companies. Some are already under clinical trial.

The approaches used for their production don’t differ much from the ones classically used in vaccines, where the antigens — a compound of the pathogen used to generate immunity in the patient — can be the inactivated virus, as well as the genetic material or a virus protein, which is grown on a large scale in chicken eggs, mammalian/insect cell tissue or genetically modified microorganisms.

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World-first CRISPR-edited sugarcane helps reduce environmental impact

Sugarcane is an important food crop, but it’s large environmental impact means there’s plenty of room for improvement. Unfortunately it’s tricky and time-consuming to breed new varieties, but now researchers have used CRISPR gene-editing to do so quickly and more easily.

Sugarcane is a key source of sugar, obviously, but that’s not its only product – the oil in the leaves and stems is often used to make bioethanol for greener fuels and plastics. But these don’t come cheap – sugarcane takes up a large percentage of farmland in many countries, which fuels deforestation. It also takes a huge amount of water to grow, and creates plenty of waste and pollution during processing.

Some of these problems can be addressed with new varieties of the plant, but sugarcane is frustratingly difficult to crossbreed due to its complex genome. It requires a lot of back-and-forth to filter out desirable traits from unwanted ones, so new versions can take years to develop.

That’s where CRISPR comes in. This powerful gene-editing tool allows scientists to switch off genes or cut them out and replace them with more useful ones. It could be useful in treating a range of diseases, but also for improving crops – and now researchers have used CRISPR to develop a couple of new varieties of sugarcane.

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4 Ethics-Breaking Biological Experiments Touted by Chinese Scientists as ‘World Firsts’

Throughout the world, scientific research and experiments involving ethical issues must first pass the scrutiny of ethics committees. In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has conducted many experiments in the field of biomedical and genetic engineering that break human ethical boundaries.

China began implementing the Ethical Review of Biomedical Research Involving Humans on Dec. 1, 2016. However, 122 Chinese scientists who co-signed an open letter in 2018 to oppose gene-edited babies criticized China’s biomedical ethics review as a “sham.”

In the United States, as ethical and moral regulations on animal research have become stricter, budgets and funding have tended to decrease in recent years, making China the most attractive place for such experiments. For example, in 2014, the U.S. government imposed a funding pause of gain of function research involving influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronaviruses, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses. In 2019, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it would stop conducting or funding studies on mammals by 2035.

In 2011, the CCP made it a national development goal to create primate disease models through cloning and other biotechnologies. According to the 2020 China Biomedical Industry Development Report published by Chinese Venture, “the overall biopharmaceutical market in China increased from $28.7 billion to $49.6 billion from 2016 to 2019, at a CAGR (Compound annual growth rate) of 20 percent. It is expected to reach $130.2 billion in 2025.”

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