OpenCRISPR, credit Profluent Natural evolution has had four billion years to experiment with living matter. From now on, artificial intelligence will also help expand the catalog of possible and desirable molecules. These so-called ‘language systems’ are no longer limited to producing text or images, as exemplified by ChatGPT or Midjourney. They can now be instructed and utilized to design new proteins, thereby potentially creating improved CRISPR scissors. The debut of the first AI-invented editing tool occurred last week. Known as OpenCRISPR, it is the brainchild of the California-based com ..read more

Marco Pasti grows corn, soybeans, wheat, barley, sugar beets, potatoes, some wine grapes and walnuts on his farm near Venice, in Italy. In addition to being a farmer, he is an advocate for science-based agriculture. Don’t miss his opinion piece written for the Global Farmer Network after the European Parliament vote on the New Genomic Techniques last February. After the EU elections next June, the path of the new regulatory framework will resume, which could mark a turning point “in favor of sound science – and possibly a major break from the mistakes of the past when Europeans treated crop i ..read more

The Italian publisher did me the crazy honor of including a quote from me on the back cover of the best book of the year (IMHO), along with quotes from CRISPR inventor Jennifer Doudna and Bill Gates. The autobiography of Katalin Karikó, the mRNA vaccine scientist, is a must-read for those who love great science and great minds. We had already blogged about her in the aftermath of the Nobel Prize ..read more

Beth Shapiro is chief scientific officer at Colossal Biosciences Plans to genetically bring mammoths and other vanished animals back to life have scientific stakes far beyond the imagery of Jurassic Park The basic technologies are all there, but perfecting them will still require a lot of work. Thanks to pioneers such as Nobel laureate Svante Pääbo, first we learned how to recover DNA from fossils, rearrange the fragments worn away over centuries and millennia, and compare them with the sequences of the closest living relatives. Then came CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning technique: using this t ..read more

Richard Slayman – Credit New York Times This is good news, to be celebrated with caution. The first patient with a CRISPR-edited pig kidney has left the hospital. A little over two weeks have passed since the surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, but according to U.S. press reports, Richard Slayman is well enough to have been discharged. Fingers crossed, then, for this 62-year-old man who, thanks to a xeno-rene, no longer needs dialysis. Before him, two patients had the courage and opportunity to have a pig heart transplanted, both of whom died after a few weeks: David Bennett from a porc ..read more

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It could take a while to bring the first CRISPR products to our tables, but it is always a good time to see what progress is being made in the labs. Here are some novelties, reported by Isaaa: high-fiber barley, aromatic soy milk, extralong-grain wheat, TiGER strawberries, and my favorites: seedless, thornless, and higher-yielding blackberries and black raspberries ..read more

If you are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, don’t miss the live dance performance to be held at the MIT Museum on March 16th. The Choreography of CRISPR is all about “twisting, cutting, inserting, copying, repeating, palindromes, and cluster”, “an intricate dance of spiraling and folding patterns” (you can watch a minute from the première on the facebook page of the NYC-based contemporary dance company Pigeonwing Dance; choreography by Gabrielle Lamb, original music by James Budinich ..read more

The goal is to treat unborn children as early as possible, before their disease causes irreversible damage. But the ambition is to do so without heritable DNA changes, that is, by targeting only somatic tissues and avoiding sex cells. Fetal genome editing, then, differs from embryo editing, which has raised so much controversy in recent years. The best way to understand how far it has come and how much remains to be done is to tell the story of the scientist most committed to this challenge. The opportunity is provided by a longread published in STAT, where Tippi MacKenzie’s biography is inte ..read more

There is no doubt that this is good news: on February 7, the European Parliament approved the Commission’s regulatory proposal on New Genomic Techniques, covering also CRISPR plants. Some of the approved amendments (particularly the one on genetic modification of polyploid plants) have the effect of improving the text, others risk being a problem and should be reconsidered during the trilogue with member states (particularly the requirement to label all final products, even if they do not contain foreign genes). The European Parliament also brought in the issue of non-patentability of NGT pla ..read more