Episode 43 – Genetics in the field: how molecular scissors are redefining crops

For millennia, humans have selected and improved plants, helping us grow crops that are more productive, resilient and nutritious. But new genetic tools could completely redefine agriculture once more. In this episode, we explore how today’s breeders use tools like “molecular scissors” to edit plant genes more quickly and precisely than ever before. Together with EFSA expert Tommaso Raffaello, we trace the story behind gene editing, unravel the science and safety of new genomic techniques and discover what these advances could mean for the future of food and farming in Europe. 

So, what do you want to do? You want to shut down, switch off, or as we say in molecular biology, to knock out that gene. And how you do? You do it with new genomic techniques. The most famous is the Crispr Cas9 approach, which are called molecular scissors. So, they are essentially very tiny scissors. We can say that are able to cut the DNA in a very targeted way, in a very specific way, and you decide where you want to cut.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Science on the Menu. My name's Ed Bray. People tend to freak out when they hear the term GMO, genetically modified organism. But what actually are they? And why do we have them in agriculture? And what about the new genomic techniques that we see today? How do they differ? We're going to be talking about all of this.

We're going to learn together everything that there is to know about GMO. And here to discuss this is our guest, and expert Tommaso Raffaello. Thanks for joining us, Tommaso. Thanks to you. Big topic Tommaso. We're going to go deep into genetics. We're going to find out the situation in Europe and the rest of the world. And for a starting point, let's start with Europe, the situation here.

Simple question. If I was to go into a supermarket here, what GMO products would I find?