India’s CRISPR feat, with borrowed tools

ICAR has developed genome-edited varieties of rice, but has used patented CRISPR technology that will entail huge costs

- LATHA JISHNU

FOR AN organisation whose glory days are long past, new technology has helped the Indian Council of Agriculture (ICAR) find a place in the sun once again. In early May, ICAR, a vast organisation that employs several thousand scientists, announced that it had developed India’s first genome-edited (GE) rice varieties. All to the good, the two new rice varieties were tailored to meet the test of climate change by being drought-tolerant, faster-maturing and water-saving crops that required less nitrogen. Indeed, a historic milestone that “reflects India’s progress in cutting-edge biotechnology for sustainable agriculture and farmer welfare.” Such a pity that we have to burst this bubble; but burst it we must, since all these claims of ICAR stem from the use of borrowed technology—technology that is patented. This is problematic.

DRR Dhan 100 (Kamala) and Pusa DST Rice 1, the GE versions of already well-performing varieties, were developed by scientists at the Indian Institute of Rice Research, Hyderabad, and the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Pusa, using CRISPR-Cas technology. CRISPR, the acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”, is a technology that scientists use to selectively modify the DNA of living organisms. It acts as molecular scissors that can precisely cut a target DNA sequence, directed by a customisable guide. The most foundational of these technologies, CRISPR-Cas9, was discovered by Nobel Prize winners Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2012. It uses a guide RNA to target the desired DNA sequence and the Cas9 enzyme as molecular scissors. Charpentier’s firm ERS Genomics, based in Dublin, is the global CRISPR-Cas9 licensing leader and was awarded a patent in India in May 2022. It is this tool ICAR institutes have used in their GE rice breakthrough.