Category Archives: Human Genetic Engineering

On March 16, a single tweet mobilized an army of over 700 geneticists from 36 countries to battle a tiny virus by trying to understand the role human genetics plays in why some people have no reaction to COVID-19, and others get very sick and die. Goal: aggregate genetic and clinical information on individuals affected by COVID-19, tweeted Andrea Gemma, a geneticist at the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Helsinki, Finland. Just a few weeks later the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative was up and running and is now identifying human genes associated with COVID and its symptomsnothing definitive yet, although the possibility of breakthroughs has been substantially improved by the combined DNA-discovery firepower of over 150 labs and biobanks that store and analyze millions of human genomes.

Nor is this pandemic display of raw scientific muscle and intensity of focus unique right now. Pandemic-bound researchers around the world are combining forces for possibly the largest scientific hive-mind effort in history thats converging on a single conundrum. It also arrives as a slew of technologies developed over the past generation are coming online and being applied to the COVID puzzleeverything from CRISPR gene editing and faster and cheaper genetic sequencing to social media and the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning in bioresearch and health IT.

COVID-19 has ravaged bioscience just like it has cut a destructive and sometimes deadly swath through much of what we used to call normal. Yet even as labs have shuttered, experiments have halted, and droves of scientists and technicians have been laid offand research and clinical attention has been diverted from any disease thats non-COVIDis it possible that some scientific silver linings may emerge out of this tragic Year of the Pandemic?

Could we see a near-future surge of scientific advancement, what Stanford bio-informaticist Carlos Bustamante likened to what happened when we went to the moon? You had all this spillover technology that gave us, say, the Internet, he said. Or is it possible that somewhere, somehow, a new respect for science and evidence will emerge out of COVID-19? Theres kind of a reward system now for people to pay attention to facts, said George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, rather than just making stuff up. And that reward is in terms of fewer relatives and friends and colleagues dying.

As the world is teetering and we struggle to absorb a daily barrage of less than sanguine newsnot only about COVID but also in politics, racial relations, and the economy NEO.LIFE asked prominent bioscientists and big thinkers if there might be glimmers of hope that will emerge when the all clear is finally declared.

Im seeing an intensity of purpose like Ive never seen before, said Eric Topol, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. Putting this great big brain trust in science on such a seemingly insurmountable problem will change how we do things going forward.

We are seeing biologists working with statisticians, public health experts collaborating with logistics experts, added Katharina Voltz, founder and CEO of OccamzRazor. With the coronavirus, you need the experts on SARS, on spike proteins, on pulmonary diseases, to all come together and collaborate on a shared canvas.

Were asking questions we never asked about, say, the flu, added Carlos Bustamante, attributing this to the rise of the hive mind. For instance, were learning about COVID at a molecular phenotyping detail like weve not done for any other infectious disease. (Molecular refers mostly to genetics, and phenotype to observable traits in a human or other organism.) Its been amazing for this disease how weve accepted that different people respond differently to this infection. That is not true of almost any other large-scale infection we talk about.

We can take heart that for the first time in history we have the computing power to actually make sense of all of this complexity as artificial intelligence and machine learning in biology is moving from hype to reality. One of the trends that were seeing now is the application of machine learning to dissect and extract patterns from a deluge of genomic, proteomic, metabolic data, said Katharina Voltz. We can perform many experiments in silicoon the computerand only run the most important crucial parts of the experimental method in the lab, as a confirmation of our theoretical models.

Machine learning is going to transform how we think in biology, agreed Wayne Koff, CEO, Human Vaccines Project. Its going to generate hypotheses. We will be able to better focus on smaller groups of peoplethe vulnerable groups, the diseased, the elderly, the poor, the newborns, those living in the developing world.

Computers and the Internet are also lifelines for all of us personally needing to stay connected, and as biomedicine tries to navigate a world of shelter-in-place and social distancing. Weve just dragged the country through half a decade of telemedicine in three months, said Carlos Bustamante. Are we going to now give that all up and go back to having to wait in the doctors office with everybody else coughing to see a doctor?

I think this pandemic will be a big moment for biology, said synthetic biologist Pamela Silver, professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Biologys going to fix the COVID problem, but it can also fix a ton of other problems, tooproblems like the environment, food, and other diseases. And the only way were going to get there is with engineering biologymanipulating and improving the biological mechanisms.

One way to accomplish this is what Silver and other synthetic biologists call plug and playthe creation of basic biological components for research and for developing treatments and preventatives like vaccines that have been synthesized in a lab, ready to be deployed, say, when the next virus arrives. Im thinking that as we learn how to manipulate viruses and create methods for booting up responses faster it becomes a kind of plug-and-play system that is nimble, said Silver, and this goes not just for vaccines. It goes for everything, anything. You have a new disease, or any kind of therapeutic, and youre better prepared.

Eric Topol, however, frets about the neglect or lack of emphasis on non COVID-19 diseases. This is a concern and will continue to be for the near future. Katharina Volz added that once this crisis is over, we need to hyper-focus on other diseases, too. You really have to put this same urgency that we have for COVID now and apply it to other diseases that may have a potentially bigger economic and personal impact than COVID, she said, Alzheimers and Parkinsons and many others.

Weve just dragged the country through half a decade of telemedicine in three months.

Scientists also worry about the leadership vacuum they see in the world. I hope, as we go forward, we will get better leadership, said Eric Topol. Weve seen how science can contribute where it was given true authority, so I think thats going to be another path forwardI hopealthough in the U.S. we have horrible tensions between politics and science that shouldnt exist.

No one really knows what biomedicine will look like when this is over. But it is comforting to know that something positive may come out of COVID. As Carlos Bustamante said: I want everything I do to be drafted behind COVID. Im thinking of the mother of all cycling teams. [Cycling teams assign one cyclist to ride first in line so the others can draft behind them, which makes it easier for them to pedal]. And youre drafting behind COVID, and then once youve reached the finish line, you can take that energy and hopefully channel it into other disease areas that can be cured.

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After the MadnessPandemic Silver Linings in Bioscience - NEO.LIFE

How cancer cells adapt to stress

Bacteria adapt to harsh conditions such as antibiotic exposure by acquiring new mutations, a process called stress-induced mutagenesis. Cipponi et al. investigated whether similar programs of mutagenesis play a role in the response of cancer cells to targeted therapies. Using in vitro models of intense drug selection and genome-wide functional screens, the authors found evidence for an analogous process in cancer and showed that it is regulated by the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling pathway. This pathway appears to mediate a stress-related switch to error-prone DNA repair, resulting in the generation of mutations that facilitate the emergence of drug resistance.

Science, this issue p. 1127

In microorganisms, evolutionarily conserved mechanisms facilitate adaptation to harsh conditions through stress-induced mutagenesis (SIM). Analogous processes may underpin progression and therapeutic failure in human cancer. We describe SIM in multiple in vitro and in vivo models of human cancers under nongenotoxic drug selection, paradoxically enhancing adaptation at a competing intrinsic fitness cost. A genome-wide approach identified the mechanistic target of rapamycin (MTOR) as a stress-sensing rheostat mediating SIM across multiple cancer types and conditions. These observations are consistent with a two-phase model for drug resistance, in which an initially rapid expansion of genetic diversity is counterbalanced by an intrinsic fitness penalty, subsequently normalizing to complete adaptation under the new conditions. This model suggests synthetic lethal strategies to minimize resistance to anticancer therapy.

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MTOR signaling orchestrates stress-induced mutagenesis, facilitating adaptive evolution in cancer - Science Magazine

To capture the speed and audacity of its plan to field a coronavirus vaccine, the Trump administration reached into science fictions vault for an inspiring moniker: Operation Warp Speed.

The vaccine initiatives name challenges a mantra penned by an actual science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke: Science demands patience.

Patience is essential for those who ply the science of vaccines. But in that field, challenging economic conditions and a forbidding regulatory system converge with the immune systems complexity and the resilience of microscopic pathogens. Add in drug companies preference for big profits and the result is a trash heap of failed and abandoned efforts.

In the last 25 years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved new vaccines for only seven diseases. A vaccine to protect against the Ebola virus won approval just last year, three years after the epidemic in West Africa ended.

But in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 Americans and cratered the U.S. economy, Trump has shown little tolerance for sciences deliberate pace. And scientists, with fingers crossed, are falling in line.

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The president declared that he wants 300 million doses enough to protect as many as 90% of Americans developed, manufactured and delivered by January 2021. He has ordered academics, government officials, private companies and the U.S. military to work together to make it so.

That means big and it means fast, Trump said. A massive scientific, industrial and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.

The new effort will demand the support, development, testing and assessment of several promising vaccine candidates by scientists at the National Institutes of Health, the FDA and companies and academic institutions across the world.

It will require the manufacture, procurement and storage of complex biologic medicines, as well as the vials, needles, syringes and storage equipment needed to deliver them. All will be needed on a massive scale.

And all that materiel will need to be transported, distributed and possibly administered by an army of logistics specialists.

Wherever possible, Operation Warp Speed envisions that many steps that have always followed each other in strict sequence clinical trials and production, for instance, or government approval and supply-chain development be done in parallel.

The program has already awarded a total of $2.16 billion to five companies with vaccine candidates at different stages of development.

To lead the effort, Trump tapped immunologist Moncef Slaoui, a pharmaceutical venture capitalist and former chairman of vaccines at the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline. The U.S. Armys most senior logistics and procurement specialist, Gen. Gustave Perna, will be the operations chief operating officer. Both expressed confidence in the operations success.

Perna called the project herculean. Slaoui, who has been criticized for holding a major stake in at least one of the vaccine makers that stands to benefit from Operation Warp Speed, told Trump we will do the best we can.

The time is short and the stakes are high. Just over four months after the coronavirus announced its presence inside the United States, President Trump is determined to send the country back to work.

With no effective treatment in sight, and no indication that the coronavirus would magically disappear, as Trump has frequently predicted, a vaccine will be the ultimate game changer in the pandemic, according Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nations leading expert on the outbreak.

Theres never a guarantee of success, Fauci said. But he added that he was cautiously optimistic that by winter, at least one of nearly a dozen promising vaccine candidates would have shown itself to be safe and effective in inducing immunity in humans.

Vaccine scientists are similarly cautious, especially of a testing schedule that will compress both the size and duration of safety and effectiveness trials and even overlap them in a bid to save time.

Its fine for politicians to say were going to have a vaccine next month, said Mayo Clinic immunologist Dr. Gregory Poland. But the literature is littered with false starts and unanticipated safety effects in vaccines.

Poland noted that a vaccines rarer side effects are often not recognized until its put into broad use. To ferret out an adverse outcome that only occurs in one person in 100,000, for instance, a company would need to test it in 384,250 people from broad backgrounds and with a variety of medical conditions, he said.

Such large trials are unlikely in the rush to field a vaccine, Poland said, and he fears the result could be a dangerous erosion of public trust. The yearly flu shot carries a risk of less than 1 in 1 million cases of the neurological complication Guillain-Barre syndrome, he said. And even with that low a risk, close to half of Americans refuse to get it.

You have a whole spectrum of people out there who wont be reassured by any amount of information, Poland said. If we dont pay strict attention to safety, this is going to backfire.

Money may help. Congress approved $8.3 billion in early March to fund federal agencies pandemic response. And scientists across the world have been scrambling to design vaccines to protect a population with no immunity to the deadly new pathogen.

Scientists in China, Kazakhstan, India, Russia, Germany, Sweden and the United States have brought 10 potential COVID-19 vaccines to the point where they are being evaluated in humans in some form. Another 115 are considered by the World Health Organization to be in the preclinical stage of development.

In some cases, these preclinical vaccine candidates are scarcely off the drawing board. In others, they are still being tweaked or tested in cells. Some are being tried in lab animals.

The prospective vaccines range widely in their design and novelty. There are those that challenge a persons immune system with a killed or attenuated virus, the traditional approach used by the polio vaccine and other immunizations. Others are products of genetic engineering and have never been tried in a vaccine before.

The vaccine candidates also vary in their ease of manufacture, the number of doses a patient needs to gain lasting immunity, and the way they are administered.

FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn has said his agency evaluated about 10 vaccine candidates in early studies. By late May, it had narrowed its focus to five candidates that will begin a rapid and sometimes overlapping progression through human studies of safety and effectiveness.

Meanwhile, the groundwork for large-scale production is already being laid. Trump has said that the U.S. military may aid in the manufacture, and companies with the capability to produce vaccines will be recruited to do so.

Given the pressing urgency of the administrations deadline, vaccine candidates that can be produced fastest, transported most easily and administered to patients most efficiently will likely win the most and earliest support, experts said.

The redundancy built into Operation Warp Speed may also prove a vital safeguard against failure.

If the coronavirus shows signs that it is mutating in ways that could make one vaccine candidate ineffective, the scientific judges could swiftly shift their preferences toward a competitor that can be adapted more readily to changes in the virus. If rare but untoward effects show up with broader use, back-up vaccines could be brought on line. Some vaccines will be found to work better or worse in specific populations, and can be used accordingly.

The result will be an evolving panoply of vaccine choices, not only because some will be ready earlier than others, but because some will be more effective than others in certain populations.

There will be of necessity multiple types of vaccines, Poland said.

Michael S. Kinch, who directs the Center for Drug Discovery at Washington University in St. Louis, said that while there are pitfalls inherent to Operation Warp Speed, another pandemic offers comforting reassurance that in fielding the right drug, patience is an essential virtue.

In the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the first generation of drugs was mediocre at best, he said. As scientists learned more about the virus and the disease it causes, the medicines became more effective.

That may be a model for what were going to have here, Kinch said. We may not get the best vaccine up front. But hopefully it will be good enough and will be replaced later by better vaccines. We have may just have to live with that until we get a better one.

Read more from the original source:
Can Operation Warp Speed have a COVID-19 vaccine this year? - Los Angeles Times

Shown above are two different 3D views of TetX7 (green), a tetracycline-destroying enzyme that causes resistance to all tetracycline antibiotics (the small multicolored molecule in the center). Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have found that genes that confer the power to destroy tetracyclines are widespread in bacteria that live in the soil and on people. (Video: Timothy Wencewicz)

The latest generation of tetracyclines a class of powerful, first-line antibiotics was designed to thwart the two most common ways bacteria resist such drugs. But a new study from researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found that genes representing yet another method of resistance are widespread in bacteria that live in the soil and on people. Some of these genes confer the power to destroy all tetracyclines, including the latest generation of these antibiotics.

However, the researchers have created a chemical compound that shields tetracyclines from destruction. When the chemical compound was given in combination with tetracyclines as part of the new study, the antibiotics lethal effects were restored.

The findings, available online in Communications Biology, indicate an emerging threat to one of the most widely used classes of antibiotics but also a promising way to protect against that threat.

We first found tetracycline-destroying genes five years ago in harmless environmental bacteria, and we said at the time that there was a risk the genes could get into bacteria that cause disease, leading to infections that would be very difficult to treat, said co-senior authorGautam Dantas, professor of pathology and immunology and of molecular microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Once we started looking for these genes in clinical samples, we found them immediately. The fact that we were able to find them so rapidly tells me that these genes are more widespread than we thought. Its no longer a theoretical risk that this will be a problem in the clinic. Its already a problem.

In 2015, Dantas, also a professor of biomedical engineering, andTimothy Wencewicz, associate professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, discovered 10 different genes that each gave bacteria the ability to dice up the toxic part of the tetracycline molecule, thereby inactivating the drug. These genes code for proteins the researchers dubbed tetracycline destructases.

But they didnt know how widespread such genes were. To find out, Dantas and first author Andrew Gasparrini then a graduate student in Dantas lab screened 53 soil, 176 human stool, two animal feces, and 13 latrine samples for genes similar to the 10 theyd already found. The survey yielded 69 additional possible tetracycline-destructase genes.

Then they cloned some of the genes intoE. colibacteria that had no resistance to tetracyclines and tested whether the genetically modified bacteria survived exposure to the drugs.E. colithat had received supposed destructase genes from soil bacteria inactivated some of the tetracyclines.E. colithat had received genes from bacteria associated with people destroyed all 11 tetracyclines.

The scary thing is that one of the tetracycline destructases we found in human-associated bacteria Tet(X7) may have evolved from an ancestral destructase in soil bacteria, but it has a broader range and enhanced efficiency, said Wencewicz, who is a co-senior author on the new study. Usually theres a trade-off between how broad an enzyme is and how efficient it is. But Tet(X7) manages to be broad and efficient, and thats a potentially deadly combination.

In the first screen, the researchers had found tetracycline-destructase genes only in bacteria not known to cause disease in people. To find out whether disease-causing species also carried such genes, the scientists scanned the genetic sequences of clinical samples Dantas had collected over the years. They found Tet(X7) in a bacterium that had caused a lung infection and sent a man to intensive care in Pakistan in 2016.

Tetracyclines have been around since the 1940s. They are one of the most widely used classes of antibiotics, used for diseases ranging from pneumonia, to skin or urinary tract infections, to stomach ulcers, as well as in agriculture and aquaculture. In recent decades, mounting antibiotic resistance has driven pharmaceutical companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing a new generation of tetracyclines that is impervious to the two most common resistance strategies: expelling drugs from the bacterial cell before they can do harm, and fortifying vulnerable parts of the bacterial cell.

The emergence of a third method of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing bacteria could be disastrous for public health. To better understand how Tet(X7) works, co-senior author Niraj Tolia, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, and co-author Hirdesh Kumar, a postdoctoral researcher in Tolias lab, solved the structure of the protein.

I established that Tet(X7) is very similar to known structures but way more active, and we dont really know why because the part that interacts with the tetracycline rings is the same, Kumar said. Im now taking a molecular dynamics approach so we can see the protein in action. If we can understand why it is so efficient, we can design even better inhibitors.

Wencewicz and colleagues previouslydesigned a chemical compoundthat preserves the potency of tetracyclines by preventing destructases from chewing up the antibiotics. In the most recent study, co-author Jana L. Markley, a postdoctoral researcher in Wencewiczs lab, evaluated that inhibitor against the bacterium from the patient in Pakistan and its powerful Tet(X7) destructase. Adding the compound made the bacteria two to four times more sensitive to all three of the latest generation of tetracyclines.

Our team has a motto extending the wise words of Benjamin Franklin: In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and antibiotic resistance, Wencewicz said. Antibiotic resistance is going to happen. We need to get ahead of it and design inhibitors now to protect our antibiotics, because if we wait until it becomes a crisis, its too late.

Originally published by the School of Medicine

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Antibiotic-destroying genes widespread in bacteria in soil and on people | The Source | Washington University in St. Louis - Washington University in...

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A gene is the basic physical and function unity of heredity. Genetic engineering is the changing the structure of the genes of a living things in order to make it healthier, stronger and more useful to human. Changing DNA in cell is to understand their biology. Genetic engineering are currently used in both animal and plant cells this modifications are helps to improve performance of cell.

MARKET DYNAMICS

The genetic engineering market is expected to grow during the forecast period due to rising use of genetic engineering in the field of medical as well as in agriculture, high prevalence of infectious disease and awareness of steam cell therapy, and increasing no of genomics project due to government raising funds in genetic engineering field and more R&D. Thus, various governments are taking initiatives to create awareness amongst people about genetic engineering.

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Integrated DNA Technologies, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Merck KGaA, Horizon Discovery Group, Transposagen Biopharmaceuticals, New England Biolabs, Genscript Biotech Corporation, Lonza Group, Origene Technologies, Sangamo Therapeutics

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Market size & shares

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Genetic Engineering Market to 2027 Global Analysis and Forecasts by Technology (CRISPR, TALEN, ZFN, Antisense, Other Technologies); By Application (Cell line Engineering, Genetic Engineering, Diagnostics & Therapeutics); By End User (Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Companies, Academic and Research Institutes, Contract Research Organizations) and Geography

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How big will the market for Genetic Engineering be in 2027? What is the current CAGR of the Genetic Engineering Market? Which product is expected to have the highest market growth? Which application should be used to win a large part of the market for Genetic Engineering ? Which region is likely to offer the most opportunities on the Genetic Engineering Market? Will the market competition change in the forecast period? Who are the main players currently active in the global Genetic Engineering Market? How will the market situation change within the coming years? What are the usual commercial tactics for players? What is the growth perspective of the global Genetic Engineering Market?

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Genetic Engineering Market 2020 Reflect Impressive Expansion by Integrated DNA Technologies, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Merck KGaA, Horizon Discovery...

Is there now a way to genetically engineer crops to create food that people can confidently consider natural?

Gene-editing technology sounds like it might offer this possibility. By altering an organisms genetic material, or genome, without introducing genes from other species, advocates of genome editing argue the technique can sidestep most of the difficult ethical and regulatory challenges plaguing organisms with added transgenes, which are genes from other species. Some even argue these cisgenic products are natural enough to count as organic.

As ethicists specializing in how technology alters human-nature relations, we can understand why advocates see the ethics this way. If crossing species lines is the measure of whether a technique counts as natural or not, then genome editing appears to have the potential to pass a naturalness test.

Genome editing, its boosters say, can make changes that look almost evolutionary. Arguably, these changes could have happened by themselves through the natural course of events, if anyone had the patience to wait for them. Conventional breeding for potatoes resistant to late blight is theoretically possible, for example, but it would take a lot of time.

Although we understand the potential advantages of speed, we dont think an ethics hinging on the idea of cisgenesis is adequate. We propose a better ethical lens to use in its place.

Our work is part of a four-year projectfunded by the Norwegian Research Council scrutinizing how gene editing could change how we think about food. The work brings together researchers from universities and scientific institutes in Norway, the U.K. and the U.S. to compare a range of techniques for producing useful new crops.

Our project is not focused on the safety of the crops under development, something that obviously requires concerted scientific investigation of its own. Although the safety of humans and the health of the environment is ethically crucial when developing new foods, other ethical issues must also be considered.

To see this, consider how objections against genetically modified organisms go far beyond safety. Ethical issues around food sovereignty range broadly across farmer choice, excess corporate power, economic security and other concerns. Ethical acceptability requires a much higher bar than safety alone.

Although we believe gene editing may have promise for addressing the agricultural challenges caused by rising global populations, climate change and the overuse of chemical pesticides, we dont think an ethical analysis based entirely on crossing species lines and naturalness is adequate.

It is already clear that arguing gene-edited food is ethical based on species lines has not satisfied all of gene editings critics. As Ricarda Steinbrecher, a molecular biologist cautious about gene editing, has said, Whether or not the DNA sequences come from closely related species is irrelevant, the process of genetic engineering is the same, involving the same risks and unpredictabilities, as with transgenesis.

Comments of this kind suggest talking about species lines is an unreliable guide. Species and subspecies boundaries are notoriously infirm. Charles Darwin himself conceded in Origin of Species, I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other.

The 2005 edition of the Mammal Species of the World demonstrated this arbitrariness by collapsing all 12 subspecies of American cougars down to one Puma concolor cougar overnight. In 2017, the Cat Classification Task Force revised the Felidae family again.

If species lines are not clear, claiming naturalness based on not crossing species lines is, in our view, a shaky guide. The lack of clarity matters because a premature ethical green light could mean a premature regulatory green light, with broad implications for both agricultural producers and consumers.

We think a more reliable ethical measure is to ask about how a technique for crop breeding interferes with the integrity of the organism being altered.

The term integrity already has application in environmental ethics, ecology, cell biology, interhuman ethics, organic agriculture and genetics.

A unifying theme in all these domains is that integrity points toward some kind of functional wholeness of an organism, a cell, a genome or an ecological system. The idea of maintaining integrity tracks a central intuition about being cautious before interfering too much with living systems and their components.

The integrity lens makes it clear why the ethics of gene editing may not be radically different from the ethics of genetic modification using transgenes. The cell wall is still penetrated by the gene-editing components. The genome of the organism is cut at a site chosen by the scientist, and a repair is initiated which (it is hoped) will result in a desired change to the organism. When it comes to the techniques involved with gene editing a crop or other food for a desired trait, integrity is compromised at several levels and none has anything to do with crossing species lines. The integrity lens makes it clear the ethics is not resolved by debating naturalness or species boundaries.

Negotiation of each others integrity is a necessary part of human-to-human relations. Adopted as an ethical practice in the field of biotechnology, it might provide a better guide in attempts to accommodate different ethical, ecological and cultural priorities in policymaking. An ethic with a central place for discussion of integrity promises a framework that is both more flexible and discerning.

As new breeding techniques create new ethical debates over food, we think the ethical toolbox needs updating. Talking about crossing species lines simply isnt enough. If Darwin had known about gene editing, we think he would have agreed.

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Ethicists: We need more flexible tools for evaluating gene-edited food - The Conversation US