Vaivém: Brazilian agriculture enters the lower-cost gene editing phase

After the great digital transformation, agriculture undergoes a silent genetic transformation. The CTNBio (National Technical Commission on Biotechnology) approved the genetic editing done with the CRISPRs technique as a conventional action, and not transgenic.

CTNBio’s opinion was given on a genetic editing promoted by Embrapa to deactivate anti-nutritional factors in soy. They make digestibility and nutrient absorption difficult, especially by monogastric animals such as pigs and chickens.

Alexandre Nepomuceno, general manager of Embrapa Soja, and with 33 years of experience in the company’s laboratories, says that this is a great advance. For him, it is a democratization of new technologies for the use of biotechnology in agriculture. The transgenic process is expensive, time consuming and is reduced to few companies with the power to develop such a technology.

The new system already puts on the market at least three dozen small, medium and startup companies focused on these new technologies.

Investments are focused on species diversification, unlike current projects that target large crops, such as soybeans, corn and cotton.

Gene editing is the revolution that is coming. It manipulates the DNA of a species itself, often focusing on what nature has already done or can do. Transgenics, on the other hand, comes from outside, with a DNA exogenous to the plant, says Nepomuceno.

For the head of Embrapa, soy gene editing imitates some processes that already exist in nature, but which would take a long time to be obtained, for example, by a classical improvement. The important thing, according to him, is that biosecurity is preserved.

Gene editing CRISPRs (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), in addition to reducing production and process approval costs, takes the product earlier to the field and has a faster commercial release. fast.

The CRISPRs system is like precision molecular scissors. It locates the gene that needs to be manipulated so that some characteristics of the plant are eliminated. In the case of Embrapa’s soybean process, the anti-nutritional factor lectin in the oilseed’s DNA was deactivated.

For Liliane Henning, a researcher at Embrapa Soja, the changes aim to ensure not only the nutritional quality of soy, but also a reduction in the costs of the product in animal feed.

The use of the system will allow some soybean varieties to be more tolerant to drought, changes in the quality of the oil and even in the production of soybeans geared more towards biodiesel.

The same could happen with corn destined for the production of ethanol, paper or glue. Sugarcane, grapes, beans and açaí are products that are also on the radar for genetic improvement.
One of the big differences for the soy and other crop chain between the transgenic systems and CRISPRs is the costs and the time of maturation of a project.

A transgenic variety takes years of research and a period of experimentation before the product is commercially available. In addition, there is a wait for the approval of importing countries.

In the case of gene editing, after the evaluation by CTNBio, there is already a release for the use of varieties, avoiding costs that exceed US$ 150 million per project in the case of transgenics.
Gene editing can do in six months what a classic improvement would take ten years.

The legislation on genetic editing is also being quite different from that of transgenics, according to Nepomuceno. Contrary to what happened with transgenics, when each country introduced specific legislation, in the case of genetic editing, there is harmonization between the different countries. “It is a modern and aligned legislation”, says the researcher.

For the head of Embrapa, this is the moment for Brazilian agribusiness entrepreneurs to invest. Otherwise, the country will continue to pay royalties.

Innovation comes a lot from public-private investment. Ideally, the private sector should participate with at least 40% of these investments. Today it is at 20%. “Brazilian agribusiness, however, is a sector that puts very little hand in the pocket”, he says.