UK may allow gene editing in crops

摘要

THE UK government is exploring the possibility of using gene editing to modify livestock and food crops, for instance to make crop plants resistant to disease. Gene editing is strictly regulated in the European Union, in what virtually amounts to a ban, but now the UK has left the EU it has some freedom to set its own rules.The consultation was announced by environment secretary George Eustice at the Oxford Farming Conference last week."Gene editing is a mechanism to precisely edit the genome of an organism," says Lesley Torranc at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, UK. Instead of inserting entire genes, or changing DNA at random, gene editing allows for highly specific changes, even altering a single "letter" of an organism's DNA sequence.