CRISPR on Climate Change
Katherine Kim
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13 years ago, in June 2012, researchers Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published their paper in Science, demonstrating that a bacterial immune system could be programmed to locate and cut DNA within any organism. The earliest patients of this technique receive the first approved medical treatment, a gene therapy for sickle-cell disease. “The potential is huge”, says Doudna, “There is a coming revolution right now with CRISPR”. Today, this technique is being used to mitigate the risks of climate change, delivering animals and plants to tolerate environmental stresses.
Global warming brings many extreme events to different regions of the world. Chad has been seen with excessive flooding, Somalia with a severe drought, Central African Republic with a lack of clean water, and many other countries have been inflicted with effects of climate change. Thus, a call was made to transform agrifood systems to address the impact of climate change.
Many companies are utilizing CRISPR to develop their own crops and animals such as corn with shorter and stronger stalks to reduce the loss of crops, novel cover crops that can help sequester more carbon dioxide, and animals that can resist zoonotic diseases.
The Innovation Genomics Institute (IGI), founded by Doudna, has worked to disable a gene that influences the number of pores in a plant’s leaves. These pores, known as stomata, allow plants to take in carbon dioxide, emit oxygen, and release water. The goal is to reduce the amount of water released to preserve water and survive in drier conditions. Doudna describes this process as “providing a trait that could have occurred naturally”, they simply “accelerated that process with CRISPR”.
Despite the usage of CRISPR, making these changes in a genome takes considerable time and effort to ensure that the changes made don’t affect the plant’s overall health or food safety. IGI’s earlier attempts eliminated 80% of the stomata in plants, however, its ability to release oxygen and take in carbon dioxide were also decreased, impacting its growth and survival. IGI IGI, focusing on a different gene, managed to reduce pores by 20% allowing the plant to preserve water with no impact on its ability to exchange gases.
Slowly with these changes, risks of climate change are being mitigated with more crops and animals being developed to achieve food security. With these contributions to increase yield, enhance nutrition, and greater environmental sustainability, gene editing can be used to attain the top three Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) identified by the United Nations.
Works Cited
“Countries most affected by Climate Change.” Iberdrola, https://www.iberdrola.com/sustainability/top-countries-most-affected-by-climate-change. Accessed 5 March 2025.
Dionglay, Clement. ISAAA, 6 July 2022, https://www.isaaa.org/blog/entry/default.asp?BlogDate=7/6/2022.
Temple, James, and Casey Crownhart. “How a breakthrough gene-editing tool will help the world cope with climate change.” MIT Technology Review, 2 November 2024, https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/11/02/1106579/how-a-breakthrough-gene-editing-tool-will-help-the-world-cope-with-climate-change/. Accessed 5 March 2025.
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