
The world of CRISPR Cas9 is a double-edged sword for food safety and security. But then, that’s true for most technologies. Nuclear energy makes electricity and bombs too!
The good thing is that we can now quickly engineer the traits we need in plants (and animals?) to improve the nutritive value of the produce, and yield as well.
The bad stuff is that if we can engineer plants to produce useful things, we can also engineer them to produce toxins and poisons.
The article at this link gives us a glimpse at the good possibilities – https://biooekonomie.de/en/nachrichten/better-tomatoes-genome-editing
Here, a team engineered a wild tomato plant to have much more nutrition (lycopene-rich) and ten times the yield. And all this within one single generation of breeding.
The CRISPR Cas9 method is superior to the traditional development of desirable plant “hybrids.” The conventional approach can take years or decades and will also introduce other characteristics we can do without. They could, for example, be more susceptible to disease and pests.