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06

Apr
2020

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BARDA, Department of Defense, and SAb Biotherapeutics to Partner to Develop a Novel COVID-19 Therapeutic

On 06, Apr 2020 | No Comments | In Blog, Featured | By admin


Published by Medical Counter Measures

A therapeutic to treat novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is moving forward in development through a partnership between BARDA, the Department of Defense Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Defense (JPEO – CBRND), and SAb Biotherapeutics, Inc. (SAb), of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Using an interagency agreement with JPEO’s Medical CBRN Defense Consortium, BARDA transferred approximately $7.2 million in funding to (JPEO – CBRND) to support SAb to complete manufacturing and preclinical studies, with an option to conduct a Phase 1 clinical trial.

Read the full press release here.

30

Mar
2020

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Agri-Pulse: Can cows be used to fight coronavirus?

On 30, Mar 2020 | No Comments | In Blog, Featured | By admin

Bovine plasma donors genetically engineered to produce human antibodies are in the front lines of the struggle against coronavirus.

SAB Biotherapeutics, a Sioux Falls, S.D., biotechnology company that has been successfully testing use of antibodies from cows to fight diseases such as another coronavirus, Middle East respiratory syndrome, now is engaged in developing a treatment for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Read the full article here.

Times Argus: High-tech chestnuts: US to consider genetically altered tree

On 07, Nov 2019 | No Comments | In Blog, Featured, Future of Agriculture | By admin

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) — Chestnuts harvested from high branches on a chilly fall morning look typical: they’re marble sized, russet colored and nestled in prickly burs. But many are like no other nuts in nature.

In a feat of genetic engineering, about half the chestnuts collected at this college experiment station feature a gene that provides resistance to blight that virtually wiped out the American chestnut tree generations ago.

Read more here. 

Farm to Food Gene Editing: The Future of Agriculture

On 25, Apr 2019 | No Comments | In Blog, Featured, Future of Agriculture | By admin

Curious about what gene editing is? Watch this video to learn how CRISPR is helping farmers grow better crops to feed our growing population.

USA Today: Earth Day for a dairy farmer: Thinking decades down the line

On 23, Apr 2019 | No Comments | In Blog, Featured, Future of Agriculture | By admin

April 22, 2019

What U.S. dairy farmers of today are doing to preserve our environment

I’ve had the honor of working with dairy farmers for years, and a lot of what you think about them is true. They’re modest. They’re connected to the earth. And they work incredibly hard. Every day, they’re up before dawn, working 12 and 14-hour days, whether it’s 90 degrees out or 50 degrees below zero.
 
They choose this hard work because they believe in the importance of providing nutritious, great-tasting food, like the milk in your child’s glass or the slice of cheese on her favorite sandwich.

What you might not know is that dairy farmers are working just as hard to ensure our children inherit a healthy planet. They know it’s the right thing to do. And when 95% of dairy farms are family-owned, they do it to ensure the land is there for their children. 

But the issues facing our planet require more than just individual action, which is why the U.S. dairy community has made sustainability an industry-wide priority. Years’ worth of investments, research — and, yes, hard work — have allowed us to address critical environmental issues, like climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. 

Dairy farmer and nutritionist Rosemarie Burgos-Zimbelman, who has dedicated her life to dairy nutrition.

Dairy farmer and nutritionist Rosemarie Burgos-Zimbelman, who has dedicated her life to dairy nutrition. (Photo: Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy)

This Earth Day, and every day, America’s dairy farmers are living up to that responsibility. May they never tire.

Vilsack is the former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and the current president and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council.

Click Here for More


Science makes bread taste better

On 27, Nov 2018 | No Comments | In Blog, Featured, Future of Agriculture | By admin

Renegade bakers and geneticists develop whole-wheat loaves you’ll want to eat

Boston Globe: 3 policies for the future

Food is going high-tech — policy needs to catch up with it

UConn Milking System Gives Cows Udder Control

On 03, Aug 2018 | No Comments | In Blog, Featured, Future of Agriculture | By admin

https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/on-air/as-seen-on/UConn-Milking-System-Gives-Cows-Udder-Control_Hartford-489924321.html

NBC CT: UConn Gene Editing Research Could Benefit Citrus Industry

On 20, Jun 2018 | No Comments | In Blog, Featured, Future of Agriculture | By admin

The Florida citrus industry is having their worst harvest in 73 years, and scientists at the University of Connecticut are stepping in to help.

The poor harvest is in part because of damage from Hurricane Irma, but the devastation started long before that. A disease known as citrus greening has been wreaking havoc for years. UConn researchers are working on a solution.

“Our hope is that we can modify endogenous genes in citrus to create the greening disease’s resistance,” explained University of Connecticut scientist Dr. Yi Li.

Gene editing is often discussed in terms of medical advancements and new health treatments. But gene editing can also benefit the food we eat and agriculture as well. Some of the latest developments are happening in Connecticut.

Florida citrus crops have been falling victim to the greening disease since 2005. The contagious disease is spread by a bacteria found in insects feeding off of citrus crops. The bacteria grows and spreads throughout the trees. But the process is slow – it can take up to five years after a tree is infected for it to show signs of damage. As of today, 75 percent of the Florida citrus crops have been wiped out by this quickly spreading disease that has also made its way to crops in Texas and California.

The UConn scientists are working in conjunction with the University of Florida to find a cure.

“We are basically the technology development lab,” Li said. “And then once we develop the technology people in Florida our collaborators are going to use our technology to genetically modify citrus genome.”

These small, targeted changes to an organism’s original genes produce a specific beneficial result. These genetic alterations can provide plants and animals with beneficial characteristics, just like the disease resistance seen in the citrus crops.

Helping the Florida citrus crop is only part of what’s being done here in the lab. Li and his team have also been implementing their gene editing technique on landscaping products that could soon be used in your own backyard. Their latest project? Slow growing grass.

“We started to breed them to develop these traits that we thought would be beneficial to lawn owners, homeowners, and commercial lawn care people,” explains PhD student Lorenzo Katin-Grazzini, “Such as slow growth to drastically reduce the mowing time that’s needed to really just save cost and time and energy associated with turf grass management.”

Li has also created a genetically modified burning bush, a plant often found in New England that spreads rapidly. Where it grows nothing else can, decreasing the diversity in our forests.

“They either don’t produce seeds or produce very few seeds as such that the birds cannot spread them anymore because there are no seeds,” Li said. “So we hope that those plants are going to be released through horticulture in the next two to three years.”

But the lab at UConn isn’t stopping there.

“I do want to work with more ornamental plants,” Li said. “Particularly invasive plants because I do think that has a huge impact on biodiversity on our environment so if we can use gene editing technology to make that non-invasive that’s what I would like to work on.”

https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/UConn-Gene-Editing-Research-Could-Benefit-Citrus-Industry-485967231.html

CT Mirror: These CRISPR-modified crops don’t count as GMOs

On 29, May 2018 | No Comments | In Blog, Featured, Future of Agriculture | By admin

Published by the CT Mirror on May 28th, 2018

To feed the burgeoning human population, it is vital that the world figures out ways to boost food production.

Increasing crop yields through conventional plant breeding is inefficient – the outcomes are unpredictable and it can take years to decades to create a new strain. On the other hand, powerful genetically modified plant technologies can quickly yield new plant varieties, but their adoption has been controversial. Many consumers and countries have rejected GMO foods even though extensive studies have proved they are safe to consume.

But now a new genome editing technology known as CRISPR may offer a good alternative.

I’m a plant geneticist and one of my top priorities is developing tools to engineer woody plants such as citrus trees that can resist the greening disease, Huanglongbing (HLB), which has devastated these trees around the world. First detected in Florida in 2005, the disease has decimated the state’s $9 billion citrus crop, leading to a 75 percent decline in its orange production in 2017. Because citrus trees take five to 10 years before they produce fruits, our new technique – which has been nominated by many editors-in-chief as one of the groundbreaking approaches of 2017 that has the potential to change the world – may accelerate the development of non-GMO citrus trees that are HLB-resistant.

HLB yellow dragon citrus greening disease has infected orchards in Florida and around the world devastating the citrus crops.
GENETICALLY MODIFIED VS. GENE EDITED

You may wonder why the plants we create with our new DNA editing technique are not considered GMO? It’s a good question.

Genetically modified refers to plants and animals that have been altered in a way that wouldn’t have arisen naturally through evolution. A very obvious example of this involves transferring a gene from one species to another to endow the organism with a new trait – like pest resistance or drought tolerance.

But in our work, we are not cutting and pasting genes from animals or bacteria into plants. We are using genome editing technologies to introduce new plant traits by directly rewriting the plants’ genetic code.

This is faster and more precise than conventional breeding, is less controversial than GMO techniques, and can shave years or even decades off the time it takes to develop new crop varieties for farmers.

There is also another incentive to opt for using gene editing to create designer crops. On March 28, 2018, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced that the USDA wouldn’t regulate new plant varieties developed with new technologies like genome editing that would yield plants indistinguishable from those developed through traditional breeding methods. By contrast, a plant that includes a gene or genes from another organism, such as bacteria, is considered a GMO. This is another reason why many researchers and companies prefer using CRISPR in agriculture whenever it is possible.

CHANGING THE PLANT BLUEPRINT

The gene editing tool we use is called CRISPR – which stands for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats” – and was adapted from the defense systems of bacteria. These bacterial CRISPR systems have been modified so that scientists like myself can edit the DNA of plants, animals, human cells and microorganisms. This technology can be used in many ways, including to correct genetic errors in humans that cause diseases, to engineer animals bred for disease research, and to create novel genetic variations that can accelerate crop improvement.

Yi Li inspects his CRISPR altered plants in his lab. Xiaojing Wang, CC BY-SA

To use CRISPR to introduce a useful trait into a crop plant, we need to know the genes that control a particular trait. For instance, previous studies have revealed that a natural plant hormone called gibberellin is essential for plant height. The GA20-ox gene controls the quantity of gibberellin produced in plants. To create a breed of “low mowing frequency” lawn grass, for example, we are editing the DNA – changing the sequence of the DNA that makes up gene – of this plant to reduce the output of the GA20-ox gene in the selected turf grass. With lower gibberellin, the grass won’t grow as high and won’t need to be mowed as often.

The CRISPR system was derived from bacteria. It is made up of two parts: Cas9, a little protein that snips DNA, and an RNA molecule that serves as the template for encoding the new trait in the plant’s DNA.

To use CRISPR in plants, the standard approach is to insert the CRISPR genes that encode the CRISPR-Cas9 “editing machines” into the plant cell’s DNA. When the CRISPR-Cas9 gene is active, it will locate and rewrite the relevant section of the plant genome, creating the new trait.

But this is a catch-22. Because to perform DNA editing with CRISPR/Cas9 you first have to genetically alter the plant with foreign CRISPR genes – this would make it a GMO.

A NEW STRATEGY FOR NON-GMO CROPS

For annual crop plants like corn, rice and tomato that complete their life cycles from germination to the production of seeds within one year, the CRISPR genes can be easily eliminated from the edited plants. That’s because some seeds these plants produce do not carry CRISPR genes, just the new traits.

But this problem is much trickier for perennial crop plants that require up to 10 years to reach the stage of flower and seed production. It would take too long to wait for seeds that were free of CRISPR genes.

My team at the University of Connecticut and my collaborators at Nanjing Agricultural UniversityJiangsu Academy of Agricultural SciencesUniversity of FloridaHunan Agricultural University and University of California-San Diego have recently developed a convenient, new technique to use CRISPR to reliably create desirable traits in crop plants without introducing any foreign bacterial genes.

We first engineered a naturally occurring soil microbe, Agrobacterium, with the CRIPSR genes. Then we take young leaf or shoot material from plants and mix them in petri dishes with the bacteria and allow them to incubate together for a couple of days. This gives the bacteria time to infect the cells and deliver the gene editing machinery, which then alters the plant’s genetic code.

In some Agrobacterium infected cells, the Agrobacterium basically serves as a Trojan horse, bringing all the editing tools into the cell, rather than engineering plants to have their own editing machinery. Because the bacterial genes or CRISPR genes do not become part of the plant’s genome in these cells – and just do the work of gene editing – any plants derived from these cells are not considered a GMO.

After a couple of days, we can cultivate plants from the edited plant cells. Then it take several weeks or months to grow an edited plant that could be planted on a farm. The hard part is figuring out which plants are successfully modified. But we have a solution to this problem too and have developed a method that takes only two weeks to identify the edited plants.

GENETICALLY DESIGNED LAWNS
The shorter lawn grasses on the left (perennial ryegrass) need to be mowed less frequently than their conventional counterpart, shown on the right. The shorter grasses were produced using a traditional plant breeding technique. Yi Li is currently using the CRISPR technique to create grasses of other species that require less maintenance.
Yi LiCC BY-SA

One significant difference between editing plants versus human cells is that we are not as concerned about editing typos. In humans, such errors could cause disease, but off-target mutations in plants are not a serious concern. A number of published studies reported low to negligible off-target activity observed in plants when compared to animal systems.

Also, before distributing any plants to farmers for planting in their field, the edited plants will be carefully evaluated for obvious defects in growth and development or their responses to drought, extreme temperatures, disease and insect attacks. Further, DNA sequencing of edited plants once they have been developed can easily identify any significant undesirable off-target mutations.

In addition to citrus, our technology should be applicable in most perennial crop plants such as apple, sugarcane, grape, pear, banana, poplar, pine, eucalyptus and some annual crop plants such as strawberry, potato and sweet potato that are propagated without using seeds.

We also see a role for genome editing technologies in many other plants used in the agricultural, horticultural and forestry industries. For example, we are creating lawn grass varieties that require less fertilizer and water. I bet you would like that too.

Yi Li is a Professor of Plant Science at the University of Connecticut.