Hey everyone, welcome to Know Ideas Media.
I'm Nick Saik, and I gotta say I'm
pretty happy about some major news that
happened recently. CRISPR won't be
regulated as a GMO! That- that's huge. Now for those of you who know what I'm
talking about, good on you! Share this
video with somebody who has no idea what
CRISPR is, besides maybe a drawer for
vegetables in their fridge. So here's the
deal with this CRISPR thing. All it is, is
a technique to alter the genetics of our
food, and for a number of reasons it's a
pretty awesome technique. Here's the
Reader's Digest version:
CRISPR stands for clustered regularly
interspaced short palindromic repeats.
It's just a pattern in DNA. You can think
of it like genetic book ends. Whatever
sequence of base pairs a scientist puts
between those clustered regularly
interspaced short palindromic repeats
sort of gets saved. Easily referenced. And
this mechanism is a totally typical part
of prokaryotic function, so if you take a
peek inside bacteria as an example, you'd
see CRISPR in action naturally.
Scientists have taken the best parts of
this mechanism and some other ones to
create a better method of genome editing.
Because it's easy to reference, it acts
like a roadmap. You know you're in the
right spot if you see this pattern. The
other important mechanism here is an
enzyme called cas9. Now cas enzymes
come in different types, and there is a
lot of nuance to how they can be used
and what they can be used for, but for
the purposes of this simple explanation,
you can think of cas9 kind of like a
pair of genetic scissors. So you've got a
road map showing you where you're headed,
and a pair of scissors for when you get
there. You have everything you need to
engineer a genome. Cool! So what happens is this little section of RNA with the
CRISPR map floats along the target DNA
until it sees a pattern that matches its
saved CRISPR map. This part is more or
less just like a really accurate DNA GPS
system. It's saying "You've arrived at your
destination,
what do you want to do now?" Well now you get out your cas9 scissors. Cas
follows the map exactly to the spot
where you want it to cut the target DNA,
and it does that.
So you've snipped your target DNA... Now
what? Well, the cell hosting these DNA
arts-and-crafts is going to realize it's
DNA has been snipped. It happens from
time to time, no trouble. The cell has
mechanisms to repair the damaged DNA.
Those mechanisms are sent into action.
Maybe you made two snips and just
removed a section of DNA, or maybe you
added something or whatever. It doesn't
really matter what you want to do, the
point is the cell itself is going to put
everything back together for you. There
you go! Just deep enough to confuse the
heck out of normal people, and just
shallow enough to piss off all the
scientists who could have probably
explained it better... Rock in a hard place.
But the thing about this system that has
science all in a tizzy is that we've
never had as accurate a DNA mapping
system as this. Arriving at our genetic
destination has always been a bit of a
guessing game or at least a game of
trial and error.
Like maybe previous techniques were like
GPS systems with an accuracy of a
hundred meters give or take, whereas
CRISPR cas9 systems is like GPS
with like millimeter precision. It's so
much more accurate than what we've had
before. And it's also so much cheaper.
Like, orders of magnitude less expensive
than other techniques. It's fast it's
cheap and it's high-quality, and that is
no small feat. Another part of this that
was also no small feat: Scientists were
able to communicate all of this to the
USDA who said in a statement that they
have no plans to regulate crops quote
"That could otherwise have been developed
through traditional breeding techniques."
Okay so what? CRISPR does not sound like
traditional breeding. And it's not
traditional breeding. They are different.
but the thing is, using CRISPR to make
changes to genes doesn't necessarily
mean adding any other DNA to an organism.
In many cases all you're doing is
snipping out things or moving things
around, but not
having anything this means that what you
can do with CRISPR can absolutely be
something the plant could have done on
its own eventually. Okay so all of this
stuff when you put it in, like a dollars
and cents context basically just means
the substantial regulatory roadblocks
that exist for genetically engineered or
transgenic crops just aren't a problem
for CRISPR. And that means that getting
new CRISPR crops to market is gonna be
so much cheaper than trying to
deregulate a transgenic crop. And it'll
be faster too, which means we're gonna
see some really cool stuff in the next
few years and that cool stuff will make
its way to our plate and that's gonna be
awesome! Thanks for watching.
