Horizon Scanning

During the horizon scanning process, scientific publications are screened and evaluated to identify and analyze possible environmental effects of new technical developments and their applications in the field of genetic engineering/biotechnology considering the precautionary principle. The results of the horizon scanning are made available to the public in form of short summaries. It is an ongoing collection of current literature that does not claim to be complete and is continuously updated.
The current focus of the horizon scanning process can be found → here and a glossary with explanations of the most important terms can be found  here

Effective identification of CRISPR/Cas9-induced and naturally occurred mutations in rice using a multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification-based method.

So far it has not yet been possible to clearly demonstrate whether a new change in the genome of plants has arisen through an application of genome editing or whether a naturally occurring mutation is present. This study by Biswas et al. 2020 describes a method to detect both CRISPR/Cas-induced and naturally occurring mutations. Changes […]

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A male-biased sex-distorter gene drive for the human malaria vector Anopheles gambiae

In this study, a gene drive in malaria-transmitting mosquitoes (Anopheles gambiae) is presented in which an already described CRISPR/Cas-based gene drive (original publication: Kyrou K, Hammond AM, Galizi R, Kranjc N, Burt A, Beaghton AK, Nolan T, Crisanti A (2018) A CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive targeting doublesex causes complete population suppression in caged A. gambiae mosquitoes. […]

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Metabolomics should be deployed in the identification and characterization of gene-edited crops

Methods such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and gas or liquid mass spectrometry allow the detection of changes in the metabolism (e.g. production of chemical compounds) of plant cells. The collective term of these methods is „metabolomics“. Metabolomics methods can also be grouped together with genomics (analysis methods to examine the entire DNA sequence of […]

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Pervasive head-to-tail insertions of DNA templates mask desired CRISPR-Cas9-mediated genome editing events

In SDN-3 applications of CRISPR/Cas9 in mice, it was shown that DNA templates are incorporated multiple times within target sequences and cannot be detected using simple standard analysis methods (PCR, polymerase chain reaction). In the study, the authors intended to create mice containing a conditional knockout of a certain gene. For this purpose, together with […]

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