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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

gene editing

AI Model Helps Research Team Create The World’s First Gene-Edited Giant Freshwater Prawn

This week, the a research partnership comprised of Watershed AC, Evogene, and Ben-Gurion University announced they have successfully produced the first gene-edited giant freshwater prawn (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) using CRISPR technology. According to the announcement, this breakthrough represents the culmination of a year-long collaboration to enhance key crustacean traits, including growth rate, disease resistance, and environmental adaptation.

The partnership between the three entities, announced in October 2023, was initially backed by a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA). The project aimed to overcome the challenges of applying gene editing to non-model organisms with limited genomic data and protocols. The focus has been on species like giant freshwater prawn, white leg shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei), and red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii), which are crucial to the global aquaculture industry.

Computational biology startup Evogene said that it applied its GeneRator AI technology to the project to enable the precise design of guide RNAs (gRNAs), which were used to assist with gene editing. Evogene said that by predicting optimal gRNAs and accounting for un-annotated genomes and natural DNA variance, it increased the accuracy and efficiency of the CRISPR process.

Watershed AC, a sustainable aquaculture company, and BGU’s team, led by Prof. Amir Sagi, achieved the primary milestone of successfully editing the genome of the giant freshwater prawn. The key trait selected for modification was the prawn’s eye color, which was altered in the post-larvae stage, demonstrating the effectiveness of the gene-editing process.

With the successful creation of a gene-edited prawn, the IIA has green-lit funding for the second year of the collaboration, which will explore scaling up the CRISPR technology for industrial applications and expanding its use to other commercially valuable crustacean species like white-leg shrimp and red swamp crayfish.

Growing populations and increasing environmental concerns have increased the focus on developing more sustainable aquaculture solutions. Gene-editing can be used to improve key traits such as growth rate, disease resistance, and environmental adaptation in crustaceans. The global shrimp market, valued at $40.35 billion in 2023, is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.09% between 2024 and 2032. Similarly, according to industry reports, the crayfish market is expected to grow at a staggering CAGR of 31.5% during the same period.

Image credit:  Wikimedia Commons

Gene-Edited Food Startup Ohalo Emerges From Stealth as AgTech Pioneer Dave Friedberg Takes the Helm

This week, longtime food and ag tech founder and investor Dave Friedberg announced on Twitter that he has taken over the CEO role for gene-editing focused agtech startup Ohalo Genetics. Ohalo, operating under stealth for the past four years, began its life within Friedberg’s investment and startup incubator The Production Board.

From Friedberg’s tweet:

“@ohalo uses gene editing to completely reimagine agriculture, creating new plant varieties in major crops that were not previously feasible, significantly increasing yields and productivity, ultimately helping farmers make more food using far less land, resources, and capital. After recently achieving some major breakthroughs, I now believe @ohalo could become one of the world’s most important businesses and will be dedicating myself to realizing its potential.”

The move comes one decade after Friedberg sold his first agtech startup, The Climate Corporation, to Monsanto for $1.1 billion. The sale of The Climate Corp was a milestone for the broader ag tech space as it marked the first time an ag tech startup had sold for over a billion dollars.

As Friedberg takes over Ohalo, the company has begun to lift the veil of secrecy. The timing of the decision to come out of stealth (as well as Friedberg taking over) likely has something to do with Ohalo’s recent wins in the form of positive outcomes from the USDA’s Regulatory Status Reviews (RSRs) of the company’s work on gene-edited potatoes.

An RSR is a request sent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) to ask that the product, which in this case is a genetically modified plant in the form of a potato, not be regulated. Ohalo had two RSRs under consideration this year for its potato, one which focuses on higher concentrations of beta carotene – enhancing the overall health and nutrition value of the potato – and another which results in reduced glucose and fructose content in the potato, which, according to Ohalo, will reduce the adverse side effects that lead to significant spoilage during cold storage of potatoes.

In both cases, USDA’s APHIS agreed with Ohalo, essentially giving a green light for the product to move forward towards sale and consumption of the product within the U.S. without the additional oversight under 7 CFR part 340, the part of the Plant Protection Act of 2000 that gives the USDA regulatory oversight over genetically modified foods.

In the case of Ohalo’s approval (and other approvals under 7 CFR part 340), the USDA is saying that the alterations to the produce brought about using the gene-editing tools were possible through cultivation and that the risks posed by the changes were no more significant from a plant pest risk perspective than those introduced through traditional plant cultivation techniques.

Ohalo joins a cohort of gene-edited produce companies that have emerged in recent years as tools such as CRISPR Cas9 have matured and enabled breakthroughs in agriculture, healthcare, and pharma. While other ag-focused gene-editing startups such as Pairwise and Yield10 Bioscience have received significant funding over the past half-decade or so, the path towards commercialization has been slow for most and rocky for some. Benson Hill, an ag gene-editing startup with a billion-dollar valuation just two years ago, has started looking for strategic alternatives as it lays off staff.

As for the Production Board, where Friedberg has spent the majority of his time the past few years as he invested and spun up food and ag tech concepts around a variety of areas ranging from gene editing to bioreactors to beverage printing, he says he will continue to stay on some boards, while his team continues the investment work that he had been involved with on a day-to-day basis before the move.

“This is a big change for me personally, I haven’t been an operating CEO for 7+ years.. but the mind-blowing results the @ohalo team have accomplished make this decision a no-brainer,” said Friedberg.

CRISPR Specialist Pairwise Renews Partnership With Bayer to Focus on Gene-Edited Corn

Today, Pairwise announced a new five-year partnership with ag giant Bayer after touting milestones resulting from the two companies’ initial collaboration.

According to the gene-editing specialist, the initial partnership – which concluded in June of this year – had seen Pairwise help develop 27 novel traits that were transferred into Bayer’s testing programs. These included developing corn phenotypes with a 20 percent increase in kernel row numbers per ear and gene-edited soy that is more resistant to Asian soybean rust. According to Pairwise, both advances could increase yield and reduce the need for chemical inputs, such as fungicides.

The renewal of the partnership by Bayer is not only a ringing endorsement for Pairwise, but it also signifies the recognition by big ag companies of the need to leverage new tools like gene editing in the face of climate change.

The new companies’ collaboration will focus on optimizing and enhancing gene-edited short-stature corn for use in Bayer’s Preceon Smart Corn system. Short-stature has a targeted height of 30 to 40 percent less than traditional corn, which, according to Bayer, gives additional protection from crop loss due to the changes brought on by climate change, such as warming and extreme winds. Short-stature corn also enables more precise application of inputs during the growing system, resulting in reduced risk of crop loss.

“The shorter stature allows growers to optimize their operations and minimize risk, an ever-increasing concern in the face of climate-related events,” said Pairwise CEO Tom Adams.

In the announcement, Pairwise talks up the newly branded platform they are calling Fulcrum, in which the company essentially gives a brand name to the different gene-editing IP. According to Pairwise, the tools included in the Fulcrum platform include REDRAW, which the company describes as a precise templated editing toolbox that can make any type of small edit at CRISPR-targeted sites, and SHARC, a proprietary enzyme that “works well for cutting, base editing, and REDRAW editing, a combination that’s created a foundational, game-changing genome editing toolkit.”

EU Moves Towards Relaxing Rules Over Gene-Edited Food

According to a new document leaked by the Genetic Literacy Project, the European Union is moving towards relaxing its current regulations overseeing gene-edited food.

The draft regulation of the European Commission, the body responsible for drafting new regulations for the EU, recommends that food developed using tools such as CRISPR be approved as conventional rather than adhere to the laborious approval process dictated by the EU’s GMO regulations. According to the proposal, the EU would create a new category for plants developed using gene-editing techniques that could side-step the GMO categorization, provided that the new varieties could have been achieved using traditional breeding techniques.

Unlike genetic modification, which introduces genetic material from foreign species, gene-edited food introduces changes native to the species. According to the proposal, gene editing that introduces changes to the plant that goes beyond what would be possible through natural breeding techniques would require full GMO authorization.

The reasoning behind the shift is a growing recognition among European regulators of the need to embrace new science-forward techniques to deal with the increasing threat of climate change.

“The science and the evidence show that these can be achieved also through conventional breeding of crops,” an EU official told the Financial Times. “The economic rationale is very strong. If we want to cope with climate change and support food security we need these techniques.”

The new proposed legislation from the European Commission signifies an evolution of perspective around gene-edited food. In the past, the EU has viewed food developed using CRISPR and similar gene-editing technologies as essentially the same as genetically modified food (GMO), which meant they were subject to the same blanket moratorium from 2003 over any new approvals of GMO products.

While the move could potentially push the EU’s stance closer to United States’ more permissive regulatory environment for gene-edited food, the same forces which support GMO regulation and the initial ban on gene-editing – such as Greenpeace and some groups within the European parliament – plan to fight the proposal.

“The EU’s top court was clear that GMOs by another name are still GMOs,” Eve Corral of Greenpeace told the FT. “The EU must keep new GMOs regulated to make sure they pose no danger for nature, pollinators or human health.”

Washington State University Receives First-Ever FDA Approval for Gene-Edited Pigs for Human Consumption

Earlier this month, Washington State University (WSU) received the first-ever approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for gene-edited pigs for human consumption.

That consumption will be delivered in the form of German-style sausage, which will be used in on-campus catering services that raise funds for the WSU meat judging team. The pigs were processed at the WSU Meat Lab – WSU is a land-grant university, and much of the research on campus is focused on agriculture and nature sciences – and during the processing of the meat, the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspected the meat.

The approval marks the first time the U.S. FDA has approved a gene-edited pig for entry into the food supply chain. The approval is the culmination of two years of research led by Jon Oatley, a professor in WSU’s School of Molecular Biosciences in WSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

“The original intent in making these animals was to try to improve the way that we feed people,” he said. “And we can’t do that unless we can work with the FDA system to get these animals actually into the food chain.”

Oatley used CRISPR gene-editing technology to improve genetic traits in the livestock. As readers of the Spoon know, CRISPR accelerates the process through which changes to an organism’s DNA can occur as compared to other methods such as through selective breeding. And unlike transgenics (or what is often called GMO or genetic modification), CRISPR doesn’t introduce genetic materials from other organisms.

Oatley and his team gene-edited the pigs to enable them to sire offspring with traits from another male pig. This technique, called surrogate sires, allows the male animals to produce sperm carrying the genetic traits of donor animals. The surrogate sires are first edited to be sterile by knocking out their specific gene related to male fertility. From there, the animals are implanted with another male pig’s stem cells to create sperm with the desired traits of the donor male.

The long-term goal for Oatley and other CRISPR researchers is to use this high-tech form of selective breeding to disseminate valuable genetic traits in livestock. Those traits could be improved meat quality, higher protein density, disease resistance, or enhanced ability to withstand changing environmental conditions.

Oatley and his team used the investigational food use authorization process for five gene-edited pigs to demonstrate that food made from the gene-edited animals is safe to eat and is now working toward FDA approval for a line of gene-edited pigs. The pigs’ offspring, which aren’t gene-edited, have not yet received FDA approval at this point for human consumption.

Tropic Biosciences Raises $35M For Gene-Editing & RNAi Platform Aimed at Developing Tropical Crops

Agriculture scientists have continuously worked to evolve coffee crops to battle an ever-changing climate for much of the past century.

Some of the most famous examples of these efforts are from the 60s and 70s, in which horticulturists and ag scientists worked to develop hybrids to fight against an invasive coffee tree fungus (called leaf rust) that was propagating across the coffee belt of Latin America. Plant-breeding work done by research centers in Portugal and Columbia helped to create hybrids that combined the flavor of Arabica flavor properties with the fungus-fighting properties of Robusta.

While this work resulted in much more robust coffee varietials that have produced the bulk of coffee over the past few decades, coffee breeders today are struggling to keep up with the accelerating change in climate across the world that is making it ever-harder for coffee farmers to grow their crops.

Enter gene editing. Newer technologies such as CRISPR utilize genetic manipulation techniques that involve changing an organism’s DNA, so instead of spending decades to create new varietals that combine the desirable characteristics of different breeds through traditional breeding techniques, gene editing can get there an order of magniture faster by editing out specific genetic traits.

However, gene editing still requires a significant amount of time to identify the host genes that need to be edited out. To accelerate this process even further, a company called Tropic Biosciences has developed a proprietary platform that combines gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR with another biotechnology process called RNA interference, or RNAi, to accelerate the gene discovery cycle and help develop new varietals much more quickly.

In a nutshell, Tropic Biosciences enables editing to a host’s DNA to alter the target of RNA interference, allowing for direct targeting of select target genes to degrade protein production. Genes that belong to the host (such as a gene that, for example, makes a crop more sensitive to high temperature) or genes that belong to viruses, pests, or fungi (like leaf rust) can be targeted in order to protect the host against these organisms.

The company’s unique platform (called GEiGS, short for “gene-editing induced gene-silencing”), is being used to develop its own product pipeline, which as you can probably guess by its name, is focused on tropical crop commodities such as coffee, bananas, and rice. The company is also working with other clients in the world of agriculture to license the GEiGS platform to develop new crops or avian flu resistance in poultry.

Tropic’s platform has attracted $35 million in new funding. The round, announced today, includes lead investor Blue Horizon and ADQ, Bloom8 (previously Rage Capital), Skyviews Life Science, Sucden Ventures, and Tekfen Ventures, among others.

Pairwise Launches ‘Conscious Foods’ Brand to Bring Gene-Edited Leafy Greens to Market

Pairwise, a startup that specializes in developing gene-edited produce, has announced the launch of its consumer-facing brand called Conscious Foods.

The company’s first product sold under its new brand will be its gene-edited version of Brassica juncea, more commonly known as mustard greens. The company’s mustard green is a new take on a leafy green that has not been on many menus due to a pungent smell and bitter taste. With changes engineered by CRISPR, Pairwise hopes to create a nutritious alternative to kale and Brussels sprouts that also tastes good.

The company, which got approval from the USDA last August to move forward with commercializing its CRISPR-derived mustard green, plans to bring the first products to market in early 2023. The company plans to spend the bulk of the following year optimizing mixes, creating enough seed stock to provide to farmers, and also creating awareness for its new product throughout activation events.

Pairwise’s rollout of a new consumer-facing brand fits a now-familiar pattern in which a food tech platform company launches a new brand identity as it enters the commercialization stage. Over the past couple of years we’ve seen companies such as Perfect Day, MycoTechnologies, and others launch new brands that separate the final product identity a bit from the high-tech origins and try to sell the consumer on the benefits.

“Our idea is to create this brand that stands for who we are, which includes transparency,” Adams told me on a Zoom call. According to Adams, they will put information on the package that the food is produced by gene-editing and provide a way for interested consumers to get more information (such as a QR code on the package).

“We’re not going to hide from it, but we also really want to be selling the product based on the benefits rather than the technology. I know I buy products because of the benefits I get from them.”

The company has plans to release additional products beyond their first leafy greens and are currently working on developing pitless cherries and seedless blackberries. With the blackberries, the company is developing traits beyond just making them seedless that are helpful to the grower and picker.

“In the berry space, thorns present a real challenge to picking them,” Adams said. “So we’re removing them.”

French Winegrower: Let Us Use Gene-Edited Crops

Last month, French winegrower André Baniol wrote an open letter to the French Institute of Vine and Wine (IFV) and to the French Ministry of Agriculture to make a plea for relaxing restrictions on the use of genetically modified crops.

As first covered in French wine industry publication Vitisphere, Baniol made a case for gene editing as a way to get rid of harmful pesticides without changing the grape varieties.

“They would simply receive genes for resistance to cryptogamic diseases, without losing either their organoleptic characteristics or their surname, the unavoidable access key to the market,’ wrote Baniol.

Secretary General of the Assembly of European Wine Regions, Aynard de Clermont-Tonnerre, agrees. From Vitisphere:

According to Aynard de Clermont-Tonnerre, the 50% reduction by 2030 in the use of phytosanitary products requested by Europe within the framework of the Green Deal is impossible without recourse to genetics. “Other countries like the United States and Israel are already using it to release new varieties, so we shouldn’t miss the boat”. Problem, in Europe, NTGs have been subject to the same regulations as GMOs since 2021. The latter prohibits the “deliberate release” and “placing on the market of GMOs” without specific assessment of the risks to human health and the environment.

As Clermont-Tonnerre writes, the US and other countries have taken a much more laissez-faire approach to the use of gene-editing compared to the EU, essentially allowing them if any changes made using the technique could have happened through traditional plant-breeding methods. The UK, post-Brexit, has taken a similar stance towards gene-editing, and just last month, China amended its rules to allow for a fast-tracking of gene-edited crops.

Long-term, the use of gene-editing holds great potential as a way to create plants that are more resistant to disease, pests and changes brought on by climate change. It also enables the creation of new crops, such as mustard greens without a bitter taste or pungent smell.

In general, the EU has been slow to take up the subject, but as pressure from different agriculture interest groups grows and politicians in countries like Switzerland begin to push for more relaxed regulation over the technology, one has to wonder if the European governing body will begin to take notice.

Equinom Raises $10M to Develop Smarter Seeds to Feed the Protein Craze

Israeli seed breeding startup Equinom announced today that it has closed a $10 million Series B round of funding led by BASF Venture Capital with participation from Roquette, Trendlines Group, and Equinom’s current investor, Fortissimo Capital. This brings the total funding raised by Equinom to $17.6 million.

Founded in 2012, Equinom uses cross-breeding technology to create seeds and legumes that grow faster, produce better yields, and have higher protein levels. Instead of relying on GMO’s or gene editing technology like CRISPR to produce their seeds, Equinom’s scientists use predictive algorithms to precisely breed plants to produce their ideal traits. The startup claims that their technology can produce new seeds in half the time as traditional breeding.

According to a press release from the company, Equinom currently supplies its specially bred sesame seeds to food producers across the globe. Equinom will start selling its next product — a high protein pea varietal — in 2021. With its new funding, the startup plans to expand its seed distribution globally and build out its team.

As the world’s population grows, so too does the need for highly-nutrition food that can be grown without totally depleting our planet. Paired with the burgeoning demand globally for plant-based protein, it’s no wonder that seed companies are trying to find the most efficient ways to grow high-protein plants like legumes and beans — the key ingredient in alternative meat and dairy products.

Many organizations turn to high-tech solutions like gene editing (including CRISPR) or GMO‘s to create their ideal seeds. Interestingly, Equinom is eschewing these in favor of more traditional breeding, albeit breeding augmented with data and algorithms to make it more efficient. Considering the serious challenges we’ll face feeding the world sustainably, this multi-pronged approach will hopefully pay off.

Thanks to Gene Editing, Cotton (Yes, Cotton) Could Be a New Protein Staple

Odds are, you come into contact with cotton every day, in your clothes, your bedsheets, and even your coffee filters.

Soon the “Fabric of Our Lives” might be on your plates, too. Well, sort of. This month the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared a genetically engineered form of cotton, developed by Keerti Rathore, a professor of plant biotechnology at Texas A&M University, officially safe to eat. The gene editing only affects the seeds of the plant, not the fluffy stuff used to make your t-shirts, pants, and socks.

Seeds are often used as a source of protein or fat — think sunflower, pumpkin, etc. — but cotton seeds contain gossypol, a chemical that’s harmful to humans. Food companies have already developed a process to remove the chemical from pressed cottonseed oil, which is currently sold in various food products and vegetable oil mixes. However, Rathore’s process, called “RNA interference,” shuts off the gossypol gene in cotton seeds so people can safely eat them in their whole form. It also keeps the gossypol in the rest of the cotton plant, where it acts as a natural pest deterrent.

Since cotton is relatively plentiful, Rathore told Reuters that he hopes that the seeds could be an affordable, nutrient-rich source of protein when added to products like granola, breads or energy bars. Cottonseed meal (what remains after the seeds have been pressed for oil) could also be used to feed fish, pigs and other animals, all of which are also sensitive to gossypol.

However, it’ll be a while before humans (or fish) get a chance to sample these new gene-edited cotton seeds. Rathore hasn’t given an exact timeline, but he told the New Food Economy he first has to license out his technology to seed companies, which can then sell to farmers.

According to Rathore, the impact from adding cotton seeds to the food system could be significant. “There are approximately 10.8 trillion grams of protein locked up in the annual global output of cottonseed,” he told Reuters. “This is enough to meet the basic protein requirements of over 500 million people at a rate of 50 grams of protein per person per day.” Since many of the world’s cotton-producing countries, specifically in African and Asia, struggle with malnutrition, that protein could make a real difference.

The cotton seeds aren’t the first FDA-approved gene-edited food. Earlier this year biotech company Calyxt began selling a gene-edited soybean oil that doesn’t require trans fats for shelf stability. Yield10 Biosciences is developing genetically engineered corn kernels to produce greater outputs. We’ve also been eating FDA-approved genetically modified foods (GMO’s) for decades, especially corn and soy.

Like GMO’s, gene editing foods — including those made using CRISPR — carry a fair bit of controversy. However, the potential benefits are significant. The new gossypol-free cotton seeds give a glimpse into how gene editing can impact our food system. As climate change and deteriorating soil conditions make it harder to cultivate certain crops, gene editing technology could not only save some of our favorite foods — like coffee and chocolate — but could also help us open the door to entirely new protein sources. Throw in a population set to hit roughly 10 billion by 2050, and these sources could be critical to helping us feed a hungry world.

CRISPR is Coming to Our Plates

A new technique is sneaking in our lives, potentially changing the foods we eat every day. From growing resilient crops, to boosting flavor to tackling allergens like gluten, gene-edited food brings to the table a new opportunity to improve health and pleasure, as well as fight climate change. And, most importantly, many scientists say they’re working only with nature’s own tools. Given the impressive change this could potentially bring to our farms, supermarkets and tables, let’s explore how gene-editing could change the world, and the challenging questions we should be asking.  

On March 28, 2018, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) with the guidance of the US Food and Drug Agency (FDA) made a big step, saying certain gene-edited plants can be designed, cultivated, and sold free from regulation. Going more into detail, biotechnology regulations state that USDA does not regulate or have any plans to regulate plants that could otherwise have been developed through traditional breeding techniques as long as they are not plant pests or developed using plant pests. This includes a set of new techniques that are increasingly being used by plant breeders to produce new plant varieties that are indistinguishable from those developed through traditional breeding methods. Among them, CRISPR.

CRISPR is a kind of molecular scissors that scientists can use to change or delete DNA sequences. The tool has been best known for its potential to prevent disease and fight cancer. But now it is being used to improve corn, wheat, rice, mushrooms, and other products. It could lead to hardier, more plentiful crops and tastier, cheaper, more nutritious food. Could CRISPR merely be a faster way of achieving what farmers have long accomplished with traditional techniques, such as seed selection, cross-breeding or mutagenesis? Probably, yes. But it’s not just this.

The possible applications are countless, from reducing food waste, water, and land usage to providing healthier fats to consumers. Some companies plan to use the popular new technology to give fruits and vegetables a longer shelf life. If successful, this could help prevent the sort of waste that comes from people tossing out vegetables and fruits deemed to be damaged or old. Each year, consumers throw away an estimated 400 million pounds of bruised and brown potatoes. The volume of waste grows substantially when you consider all of the other things we eat.

Scientists at Calyxt, a subsidiary of the French pharmaceutical firm Cellectis, developed a soybean by “turning off” the genes responsible for the trans fats in soybean oil. Compared with the conventional version, Calyxt says, oil made from this soybean boasts far more “healthy” fats and far less of the fats that raise bad cholesterol. Pennsylvania State University has developed mushrooms that do not brown, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has created tomatoes suited for shorter growing seasons. Meanwhile, other universities around the country are working on plants that will withstand droughts, diseases and the ravages of climate change. Such improvements, underway in crops as diverse as oranges, wine grapes, and cacao, could protect these plants in the future while cutting down water and chemical use, experts say.

The upsides are, therefore, quite impressive. We can imagine a not-so-distant future where new resilient crops help feed the global population, farms can overcome challenges of climate change, and we enjoy nutritious food that can prevent and fight disease.

But wait a minute, are we talking about GMOs?

The short answer is no. The difference between genetically modified organisms and gene-edited crops is the fact that the latter do not contain foreign genetic material and were not made using the bacteria or viruses that scientists employed in the first-generation GMOs. In the US, the way they are regulated is different, indeed. The FDA made a sharp separation between the two cases, saying that its authority extends only to earlier genetically modified organisms methods because it’s charged with protecting plants from infections and pests. Different is the situation in Europe, where in late July, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) came to the opposite conclusion, ruling that gene-edited crops should adhere to the same strict regulations as genetically modified organisms.

Are there proven risks?

According to the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, there is no evidence of adverse health effects directly attributable to consumption of foods derived from gene-edited crops. Studies with animals and research on the chemical composition of genetically engineered (GE) foods currently on the market reveal no differences that would implicate a higher risk to human health and safety than from eating their non-GE counterparts.

The same goes for the environment. The use of insect-resistant or herbicide-resistant crops did not reduce the overall diversity of plant and insect life on farms. However, the complex nature of assessing long-term environmental changes often made it difficult to reach definitive conclusions.

But just like with GMOs, many argue that consumers deserve a mandatory regulatory process And this is not just for scientific reasons, but for consumer and public safety and confidence.

So, why does everybody seem concerned about gene editing our food?

Lack of background knowledge, a general aversion to ingesting technological products, as well as poor labeling are primary concerns.

Most of us don’t think about it, but almost all American-grown corn and soybeans come from genetically modified seed. Wheel your cart around a supermarket, and you’ll push past aisles of GMO foods, such as bread, cereals, and crackers, as well as yogurt, milk and meat. Even cheese is made from genetically engineered rennet — the enzyme that curdles milk — instead of traditional rennet from animal stomachs.

Finally, labeling is a crucial topic. In 2016, the U.S. Congress passed a law requiring food producers to label GMOs on their food products, but those rules may not apply to new GE foods. For example, Calyxt has actually labeled its soybean oil as “non-GMO,” stating that it contains no foreign genetic material.

Unlike older genetic modification methods, the new techniques are precise, fast and inexpensive, and companies hope they will avoid the negative reputation and regulatory hurdles that hobbled the first generation of genetically modified foods. But the speed of change has startled consumer and environmental groups who say the new technology has not been adequately vetted, and they have raised alarms over labeling and petitioned regulators to add further safety reviews.

“This is hard stuff,” Federico Tripodi, Calyxt’s chief executive, told The Washington Post. “Consumers accept that technology is good in many aspects of their lives, but technology and food have been something scary. We need to figure out how to engage in that conversation.”