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Regulate genome-edited products, not genome editing itself

Nature Biotechnology volume 34, pages 477–479 (2016)Cite this article

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The plants and animals that we raise for food are vastly higher yielding today than they were in decades and centuries past, and they are often more nutritious. These improvements result largely from selective breeding programs that began with domestication in prehistoric times and that continue today with the help of sophisticated statistical analyses informed by extensive data on genomic and phenotypic variation within and between strains or breeds. This endeavor has long been, and continues to be, remarkably successful at achieving its main aims.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biochemistry, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

    Dana Carroll

  2. Department of Animal Science, University of California, Davis, California, USA

    Alison L Van Eenennaam

  3. Division of Animal Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA

    Jeremy F Taylor

  4. Department of Biology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

    Jon Seger

  5. Department of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

    Daniel F Voytas

  6. Center for Genome Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

    Daniel F Voytas

Authors
  1. Dana Carroll
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  2. Alison L Van Eenennaam
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  3. Jeremy F Taylor
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  4. Jon Seger
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  5. Daniel F Voytas
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dana Carroll.

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Competing interests

D.C. and J.F.T. are on the Scientific Advisory Board of Recombinetics, Inc., which has undertaken the molecular introgression of the Pc allele described here. A.L.V.E. is a co-Project Director on a USDA grant (2015-67015-23316 “Improvement of dairy cattle well-being by genetic dehorning”) to achieve this goal. D.F.V. is a founder of Calyxt, which applies genome editing to plants. J.S. declares no competing interests.

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Carroll, D., Van Eenennaam, A., Taylor, J. et al. Regulate genome-edited products, not genome editing itself. Nat Biotechnol 34, 477–479 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3566

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