Gene editing of crops can be one way of tackling climate change, says Plaksha varsity’s Navjot Kaur

With global agriculture facing many challenges, particularly climate change, newer technologies are required to overcome these, says Navjot Kaur, Assistant Professor of Plaksha University, Punjab, an expert in gene editing. “Conventional breeding takes around 10-12 years to develop a new strain that has improved properties, either higher yield or tolerance or stress or consuming less water or survive in salty areas. Climate change is taking place at a much faster rate. We’re struggling with these challenges on the field right now.  Hence to tackle them, we’ll need newer technologies and faster technologies,” she told businessline in an online interaction.

Kaur, whose research team of two graduate students and three project assistant associates looks at applications of gene editing in agricultural domains mainly diseases at the not-for-profit university, said in Mohali, for example, it has been raining for the past one-and-a-half months when it should not rain.

Various challenges

“We have a field project which gets flooded. We are wondering what do we do with this crop. We got to the harvest stage and now we have all sorts of pests on the field due to rains. Agriculture and food production is being impacted in a negative sense. How do we balance this out? Gene editing would be one of the solutions to balance this out,” Kaur said. 

On the other hand, climate change is leading to the depletion of water levels with rapid urbanisation adding to the woes. Land availability is also decreasing. “All of these are challenges that need a solution. Gene editing is fast. We can test things faster in the lab and validate things faster,” she said.

People will have to start understanding the technique behind how conventional breeding or gene editing is done and how they are not very different. “That probably will change the conversation around the public perception of these crops, which is a very important factor in terms of really getting them successful,” said the Plaksha varsity assistant professor. 

Gene editing vs genetic modification

Asked about people confusing gene editing with genetic modification, Kaur said a lot of “miscommunication and misperceptions”  that happened over genetically modified food can be attributed to the way they were marketed. Such a strategy backfired “all of that mess has been created”.

“I think the best possible way to move forward is if we can differentiate these two categories because what has been done is done. We can’t undo that. We can’t wash off all the 20 years of bad press and miscommunication and misunderstanding on genetically modified crops,” she said.

For any general public person to understand, genetically modified crops are “where you add a foreign gene from a bacteria or another plant or another species to express a particular characteristic”. In the case of gene editing, “you will not have any foreign DNA”, said the Plaksha University assistant professor.  

“You will only play with the DNA, which is natural to that crop. You are either adding or deleting some sequences which are already in the natural variants of that crop,” she said.

Microbes roles

On the work she and her team are doing, Kaur said it looks at applications of gene editing in other agricultural domains.  “So one of the places we are looking at is that diseases are a big issue for farmers and they lose a lot of crop yields because of that. Excessive agrochemical use is the only solution they resort to right now. Excessive agrochemical use is because the farmer doesn’t have any information source. One problem that we are working on is to develop sensors, which could help in early detection of these diseases,” she said

The team is looking at the genetic material of the pathogen as the identifier and CRISPR as the gene-editing technique. “We are using it because it can identify very low concentrations of your target. The ideal situation is that we could develop a field-deployable sensor that the farmers could utilise before they sow their crop because fungal pathogens stay dormant in the soil,” said Kaur.

The team is adopting the sensor approach. So there the group works on developing more sustainable and natural therapeutics for the crops.  “We’re looking at some microbes which are known for their biocontrol activity,” she said.

Golden vision

Instead of using a chemical, a live microbe can be used to tackle the problem in the plants.  “You could also use chemicals derived from these microbes to do it. For instance, neem oil is one plant-derived biocontrol agent. We are looking at some fungal microbes to develop what are colloquially called biopesticides,” said the university assistant professor. 

These natural microbes, which are also healthy microbes for the plant and help fight the pathogens, find a more natural and sustainable way of dealing with pests.  “The other thing is that it helps resist pests and fungus when chemical fungicides don’t work anymore,” she said. 

Kaur and her team use the university lab for developing diagnostics and therapeutics for agricultural ecosystems  and the underlying technologies they use are molecular biology and gene editing to see if these products can be improved. “We are also looking at how we could use these microbes to sequester more carbon into soil,” she said. 

Her golden vision is to find microbes that can sequester carbon into the soil, remove all of the excess carbon dioxide from the air and put it back into the soil. “There’s preliminary research, which has shown that this is possible, but I think it’s a moonshot. So this is the moonshot project that goes on in the group,” said Kaur.

Role in sustainable farming

On the role gene editing can play in sustainable farming, she said scientists such as Rodolphe Barangu and Jack Wang at North Carolina State University in the US have been able to edit genes in trees to make different versions with varying fibre content. 

“It takes around two tonnes of tree material to make one tonne of toilet paper. This is because the wood is hard and we are trying to convert it into something soft for our consumption.  What they (Barangu and Wang) have been able to do is they’ve been able to add genes to reduce the fibre content in the tree so that now the raw material that you start with is more amenable to what you want to produce out of it,” she said. 

In terms of gene editing, a paper from 2021, which has done bibliographic research on publications coming out of different countries in the world on CRISPR, does have India featured on the global map, she said. “We are in a very nascent stage in terms of gene editing research,” Kaur said, adding that an order passed by the Government in April 2022 relaxes the regulation from going through stringent regulatory processes that are there for genetically modified products, plants or food crops.  

In India, gene editing work is being carried out in rice, mustard, and banana mainly with the involvement of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research labs, she said.