Crop biotechnology: a pivotal moment for global acceptance

Abstract

The development and judicious use of agricultural biotechnology offers important contributions to food security and sustainability. Key contributions include improved yield, heightened pathogen and herbivore resistance, enhanced nutrient content, improved product quality, reduced spoilage, as well as entirely new traits. While a first wave of genetically engineered (GE) crop products has been commercialized and contributed to yield, other products -some posing significant benefits to target populations in the developing world -have become mired in controversy. Public misconception about nutritional and ecological risks, fears about multinational corporate dominance, as well as regulatory inaction have delayed the approval and use of GE crops. With new GE lines ready to pass through regulatory oversight, many of which originate from developing countries, we regard this as a pivotal moment for global acceptance of agricultural biotechnology. However, we note that some countries, international regulators, and even biotechnology companies seem willing to forego useful applications of GE crops. We conclude that educating and informing the public to combat misperception, and implementing review of regulatory guidelines based on decades of experience can help to realize the benefits of GE for food security, human well-being, and ecological sustainability.

Antimicrobial Resistance with Special Emphasis on Pathogens in Agriculture

“…Significant resistance to host can be achieved against a DNA virus by a targeted sequencespecific engineered complex of Cas9/gRNA, although the results are meant to be reproducible [95]. Long-term utilization of this strategy against a variety of genetic elements that hamper the host such as viruses can be successfully targeted [96][97][98][99][100].…”

Trend of Biotechnology Applications in Pest Management: A Review

“…Regardless of the huge resources invested to curb the progress of GMO production and reverse the innovations, the weight of the evidence in favor of their safety is overwhelming, as reflected in the position statements of diverse, prestigious scientific societies, scientific review papers, and hundreds of peer-reviewed research papers (Hallerman and Grabau, 2016;Vincelli,2016;Caserta and de Souza 2017).Accordingly, Vincelli (2018) compiled the positions of several National Academies, professional associations, Scientific Boards …etc that declared "there is no scientific evidence and reproducible studies whatsoever that current GE foods, or ingredients made from GE crops pose any risk to humans, animals and environment. They are not different in nature from those created by conventional breeding practices".…”

Genetic Engineering and Sustainable Crop Disease Management: Opportunities for Case-by-Case Decision-Making

“…Furthermore, it can be done in ways that leave no trace in the plant of foreign DNA (such as antibiotic resistance genes, plasmid fragments, etc.) [221,222]. Several examples were cited in Section 2 of the successful application of CRISPR/Cas9 technologies in developing crop disease resistance [69,70,[106][107][108][109], and many others are expected.…”