How Could CRISPR Improve Agriculture?

at that site, and while a gene edited organism. Today, we wanted to talk about a few ways that the technology is being experimented with, for example, growing spicy tomatoes and decaf coffee beans. Imagine biting into a vine ripened tomato. What flavors come to mind? Sweet? Bright? Maybe a little savory? What about spice? See Thanks to an international team of geneticists, that might be the future flavor profile of some tomatoes. Researchers in Brazil and Ireland have proposed Crisper as a

means of activating dormant capsaiusnoid jeans in tomato plants. The same genetic sequence that gives chilies their kick. In addition to creating the perfect bloody Mary, the plants promise an economical alternative to traditional peppers, which are notoriously tricky to grow. Crisper can also offer a boost to your daily breakfast routine, or rather take the boost away. A United Kingdom company is currently developing a coffee bean engineered to grow caffeine free.

That's a big deal because today's coffee beans have to be chemically decaffeinated, usually by soaking them an ethyl acetate or methylene chloride. This harsh chemical bath strips out both the beans caffeine and some of their flavor. Crisper Coffee promises a jitter free cup of Joe with all the roasty goodness of full cat. But what about no hangover wine. If you've ever wished you could have a night out on the town without suffering a head splitting hangover the

next morning, you might be in luck. A team of scientists at the University of Illinois have used their genetic scissors to boost the health benefits of a strain of yeast that's used to ferment wine, and they've snipped out the genes responsible for next day headaches. Zacora mices sarah de si a. The yeast in question is a polyploid organism, meaning that it has many copies of every gene, as

opposed to the sometimes usual too. This feature makes the yeast both highly adaptable and extremely difficult to genetically engineer using older methods, which could only target one copy of a gene at a time, But Crisper allows genetic engineers to cut across every single version of a gene in one go. Using it, the Illinois team was able to boost the amount of heart healthy resveratrol in their wine while leaving the hangover on the cutting room floor. Of course,

altering plants is one thing. What about animals. Let's look at the thorny case of horns and cattle. When it comes to cattle farming, horns are usually a no go on a fully grown bull. They pose danger to the farmer, the other cattle, and occasionally to the animal itself. Traditionally, farm raised cattle are d horned by annihilating the horn producing cells on the animal's forehead, located on two bony

proturbances called horn buds. The buds are destroyed by one of several different painful means by cutting them out with knives or by applying hot irons, electricity, or caustic substances like sodium hydroxide. These practices can sometimes lead to facial disfigurement or eye damage, but crisper might just offer a more ethical alternative. Using crisper, scientists of engineered a gene for hornlessness in cattle, effectively eliminating the need for horn

removal process in those animals. Even more interestingly, some of these gene edited bulls have been able to pass the trade onto their offspring, which is crucial for keeping the trade in population circulation in scientific circles. This has been seen as a potentially huge success story. Historically, the general public has had less enthusiasm for gene tweaked crops and livestock, although recent research suggests that those attitudes may be changing.

But what if crisper were used for something a little less Charlotte's Web and a little more Jurassic Park. Perhaps the most far out used for crisper at the moment is its potential to bring back entire species from the dead, and right now there's serious talk about resurrecting one particular species,

the passenger pigeon. Passenger pigeons used to rove the forests of North America in flocks hundreds of millions strong, darkening the skies and thundering through woods and what conservationist although Leopold described as a feathered tempest. However, that started to change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as European colonists radiated across the continent. In addition to being ubiquitous, passenger

pigeons had the unfortunate quality of being delicious. They were hunted in mass by hungry euro Americans, both for food and sport. This probably wouldn't have been as devastating to the bird's total population, except the colonists simultaneously destroyed much of their nesting grounds. This brutal combination drove the species into steep decline by the early twenty century. The last known passenger pigeon, a bird named Martha, died in captivity

in nineteen fourteen. Now scientists are looking to crisper as a way to bring these iconic birds back. A California based biotech organization called Revive and Restore has a dedicated passenger pigeon project, which aims to re establish the species by modifying the genome of the closely related band tailed pigeon. If successful, the group says they could use this approach to resurrect all kinds of extinct or critically endangered creatures,

from the black footed ferret to the wooly mammoth. Whether or not they should is, of course, still a matter of some debate, but there's no denying that Crisper has brought stuff of science fiction into the realm of the potentially possible. Today's episode is based on the article spicy Tomatoes hangover proof Wine. Is there anything Crisper Can't do? On how Stuff Works dot Com? Written by Joanna Thompson.

Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff Works dot Com, and it is produced by Tyler Clay. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.