Tag: Genetically Modified Organisms

Would you be willing to eat lab-grown insect meat in order to end World hunger? Some scientists think that might be the way to do it!

Throughout human history it has always seemed as though whenever advances in our technology have allowed us to increase the amount of food we produce, we increase our population just enough to keep a sizable fraction of our species hungry. Today the problem has become even worse as our agriculture is now using up most of the planet’s land area, we are over fishing the oceans, fertilizer runoff into the rivers and oceans is killing aquatic life while raising livestock is a big contributor to global warming. And we still can’t feed all 7 billion of us!

World Hunger Map for 2014 (Credit: Matador Network)

There are several technical advances in agricultural science that have been suggested as possible solutions to this problem: Vertical farming in factories to make better use of the land (see my post of 22 April 2017), Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) to develop crops that grow faster with less water and fertilizer (see my post of 12 January 2019), and cultured meat to eliminate the wastage of producing bones, hide and other unusable parts of an animal (see my post of 7 April 2018).

Vertical Farming can produce many times as much food on the same area as traditional farming (Credit: USDA)
Lab Grown or Cultured meat can also greatly increase the efficiency of food production (Credit: The Atlantic)

An interesting suggestion would be switch meat production from large vertebrate animals like cattle, sheep and pigs and replace it with raising of edible insects! You see a much larger proportion of an insect can actually be eaten than a cow or pig. They have no bones or tough hides; even the exoskeleton of some insects is nourishing. Also Insects are much less finicky about the sort of plant material they consume so they’re actually much more economical to produce per kilogram of edible food.

In many cultures eating insects is very common (Credit: How stuff works)

Now a new article entitled ‘Possibilities for Engineered Insect Tissue as a Food Source’ in the journal ‘Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems’  (and yes this is the first time I’ve ever heard of that journal too!) suggests that the optimal food production strategy would be a combination of all of the possibilities I’ve mentioned above. Vertical farming would be employed to produce the cheapest plant material that would then be fed to genetically modified cultures of insect cells! Such a system, according to lead author Natalie Rubio of Tufts University, would provide the greatest production of food, again on a per kilogram basis, at the lowest cost not only in dollars but also in impact to the environment.

According to Doctor Rubio “Compared to cultured mammalian, avian and other vertebrate cells, insect cell cultures require fewer resources and less energy intensive environmental control as they have lower glucose requirements and can thrive in a wider range of temperature, pH, oxygen and osmolarity conditions.” (By the way osmolarity deals with the process of osmosis, the diffusion of chemical substances through a semi-permeable membrane, which is the way living cells absorb nutrients from their surroundings.)

Of course the big problem with manufacturing insect meat for food is that most people don’t want to eat insects, they’re icky! However that’s the beauty of cultured meat, the product doesn’t have to look like the animal the original muscle cells came from, it can look like whatever the customer likes.

Would you??? (Credit: Slate.com)

So what will insect meat taste like you ask? Well that’s the beauty of genetic modification; it could taste like whatever customers want! As a marketing campaign the name of the ‘product’ could be the Latin taxonomic name. For example Grasshopper meat could be sold as ‘Acrididae’ while ant meat could have a brand name of ‘Formicidae’. To the average shopper they’ll just be meat.

In time people will just get used to manufactured insect meat, especially if it’s cheaper than olde fashioned farm raised beef, pork or chicken. The organizations fighting animal cruelty will love it because no actual animals are really harmed. It sounds like a win-win situation all around.

So, you think that you’ll willing to try some?

Can Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) be used to fight infectious Diseases?

All of the infectious diseases that afflict us have one problem in common that they must solve, how to pass from an infected individual to an uninfected one. Some take the shortest path and move from person to person by touch. Our skin is actually pretty tough however so without a cut or other wound allowing the germs to get inside infection rarely takes place. Some microbes get themselves sprayed into the air by a cough or sneeze in order to be breathed in by their victim, but that’s very much hit or miss with most of the germs left hanging out in space.

A Sneeze can release millions of disease germs ready to infect a healthy person. (Credit: India Today)

Then there are some that actually use another living creature to literally take them from a sick person to new victims. A couple of well known examples of this type of disease are malaria, which uses the mosquito Anopheles gambiae to transmit the bacteria and bubonic plague which uses fleas that are themselves transported by rats. These organisms that pass on diseases from one person to another are referred to a ‘vector’ by epidemiologists and controlling the spread of the vectors, the rats and mosquitoes has often proved to be the most effective way to fight the diseases they spread.

The Anopheles Mosquito carries Malaria one one person to another. (Credit: ZME Science)

Now some biologists are actually trying to use the technology of gene editing to modify the DNA of the vector organisms in an effort to make those species unable to spread the diseases! See my posts of 5Aug17, 1Sept18, 1Dec18 and 12Jan19 for information on gene editing. Two such projects are now reaching the stage where field-testing could soon begin!

 

I mentioned the disease malaria above, a disease that most epidemiologists believe is responsible for the death of half of all the human beings who have ever lived. Think of that, half of all the people who have ever died were killed by the single disease malaria. Even today malaria is a terrible scourge in many parts of the world killing an estimated million people yearly while 300-400 million suffer from the disease.

It’s easy to understand therefore that many efforts are underway to fight this deadly disease. One of these efforts involves the use of gene editing techniques to control the population of the Anopheles gambiae mosquito that transports the malaria germ.

Using the gene-editing tool CRISPR a high security lab in Terni Italy has produced a modified form of female mosquito whose mouth parts resemble those of the males. You see it’s only the female mosquitoes who actually bite, sucking the blood of warm blooded animals in which they incubate their eggs. Females with male mouth parts would be unable to bite, unable to breed in the wild.

GMO Mosquito feeding off of Cow’s Blood (Credit: Pierre Kattar, NPR)

The idea is to artificially breed large numbers of male mosquitoes with the modified gene and release them into the wild. There they will breed and all of their female offspring will be sterile while the male offspring will continue to propagate the edited gene. It is hoped that this will cause the local population to crash, reducing the occurrence of malaria.

The problem, as it always is with gene editing, is unintended consequences. Both genetics and ecology are extremely complex matters that we still know very little about and releasing GMO mosquitoes into the wild will almost certainly alter the environment in unexpected ways. If nothing less, the crash of the Anopheles gambiae population in an area could lead to another species of mosquito, possibly carrying a different disease such as yellow fever to move in to the empty ecological niche.

GMO Mosquitoes are kept tightly controlled at High Security Lab in Terni (Credit: Pierre Kattar, NPR)

The scientists at Terni, led by lab director Ruth Mueller, are aware of the possible dangers, that’s why they’re doing the experiments in a high security lab in order to make certain none of the GMO mosquitoes escape prematurely. To further reduce the danger the mosquitoes will be subjected to long term studies prior to any actual release.

That means that there’s a long way to go and a lot of work still to go on this project but any advance that helps in the fight against malaria would represent a tremendous victory.

 

The second project I’ll discuss involves combating Lyme disease by modifying the DNA of mice. You see the spread of Lyme disease involves a complex back and forth between mice, fleas and deer; it’s really a disease of deer more than it is of humans. Both the mice and fleas are born uninfected but once a mouse is bitten by an infected flea it becomes a carrier and any fleas that subsequently bite the mouse also becomes carriers, and can then pass the disease to a deer, or a human.

Deer Tick infecting someone with Lyme Disease (Credit: AFMC)

Some mice however appear to be immune to Lyme disease and according to MIT evolutionary biologist Kevin Esvelt that presents an opportunity. Dr. Esvelt has been experimenting with the mice, identifying the genes that provide the immunity. Dr. Esvelt now plans to use the gene-editing tool CRISPR to insert the immunity genes into the reproductive cells of the mice so that all of their offspring are born immune to Lyme disease.

Can altering the genes of Mice help to fight Lyme Disease? (Credit: NPR)

For field testing Dr. Esvelt has proposed releasing thousands of GMO mice onto some of the uninhabited islands off of Nantucket Island in the State of Massachusetts. It happens that Lyme disease is an epidemic on Nantucket; over 40% of the human population there has been infected, so the people of the island are more than ready to at least listen to Dr. Esvelt’s plan.

Now Dr. Esvelt is well aware of the possibility of unintended consequences, genetics and ecology are both very complex subjects after all. That’s what makes trying the plan on a small, uninhabited island first so attractive; the GMO mice will be confined until all of the ramifications have been studied. Only then, when not only Dr. Esvelt but all of the people of Nantucket are satisfied will the experiment move on to phase 2, releasing the mice onto Nantucket itself.

Plan for using GMO Mice to battle Lyme Disease on Nantucket (Credit: nMagazine.com)

In other words this is also a project that will take years before it can be called a success. Still, if the genetically modified mice do help to eradicate Lyme disease from the islands of Massachusetts then we will have another potent weapon in our fight against infections like Lyme disease.