“This is a critical year for CRISPR,” says Rodolphe Barrangou, a “CRISPR pioneer” and one of the scientists who first identified the bacteria in yogurt as a researcher for Danisco in 2007. He now leads the CRISPR lab at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “We know it works. We know it’s real.” Now, says Barrangou, the technology’s success depends on whether consumers will accept it.

 

CRISPR stands for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat,” a set of repeating DNA segments found in bacteria. These bacteria contain a kind of immune system that operates by recording copies of DNA segments from viruses as they first come into contact. When those viruses come along a second time, the bacterial segments (or, more technically, the spacers between the bacterial segments) effectively cut up the DNA segments of the virus, rendering that virus ineffective. All of that eventually led to a critical discovery: those repeating spacers could be programmed to edit genetic material from just about any living thing, whether human, cow or mushroom.

 

“You can [use CRISPR] across the Ag spectrum, not just big row crops,” says Barrangou, which is why he says CRISPR is “democratizing” the food system. There are scientists working on increasing antioxidants in berries, for example, and “it’s not just limited to blueberries. You can do that in wild berries

 

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