Tag Archives: University of Göttingen

Five country survey of reactions to food genome editing

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Weirdly and even though most of this paper’s authors are from the University of British Columbia (UBC; Canada), only one press release was issued and that was by the lead author’s (Gesa Busch) home institution, the University of Göttingen (Germany).

I’m glad Busch, the other authors, and the work are getting some attention (if not as much as I think they should).

From a July 9, 2021 University of Göttingen press release (also on EurekAlert but published on July 12, 2021),

A research team from the University of Göttingen and the University of British Columbia (Canada) has investigated how people in five different countries react to various usages of genome editing in agriculture. The researchers looked at which uses are accepted and how the risks and benefits of the new breeding technologies are rated by people. The results show only minor differences between the countries studied – Germany, Italy, Canada, Austria and the USA. In all countries, making changes to the genome is more likely to be deemed acceptable when used in crops rather than in livestock. The study was published in Agriculture and Human Values.

Relatively new breeding technologies, such as CRISPR [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene editing, have enabled a range of new opportunities for plant and animal breeding. In the EU, the technology falls under genetic engineering legislation and is therefore subject to rigorous restrictions. However, the use of gene technologies remains controversial. Between June and November 2019, the research team collected views on this topic via online surveys from around 3,700 people from five countries. Five different applications of gene editing were evaluated: three relate to disease resistance in people, plants, or animals; and two relate to achieving either better quality of produce or a larger quantity of product from cattle.

“We were able to observe that the purpose of the gene modification plays a major role in how it is rated,” says first author Dr Gesa Busch from the University of Göttingen. “If the technology is used to make animals resistant to disease, approval is greater than if the technology is used to increase the output from animals.” Overall, however, the respondents reacted very differently to the uses of the new breeding methods. Four different groups can be identified: strong supporters, supporters, neutrals, and opponents of the technology. The opponents (24 per cent) identify high risks and calls for a ban of the technology, regardless of possible benefits. The strong supporters (21 per cent) see few risks and many advantages. The supporters (26 per cent) see many advantages but also risks. Whereas those who were neutral (29 per cent) show no strong opinion on the subject.

This study was made possible through funding from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and Genome BC.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Citizen views on genome editing: effects of species and purpose by Gesa Busch, Erin Ryan, Marina A. G. von Keyserlingk & Daniel M. Weary. Agriculture and Human Values (2021) Published: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10235-9

This paper is open access.

Methodology

I have one quick comment about the methodology. It can be difficult to get a sample that breaks down along demographic lines that is close to or identical to national statistics. That said, it was striking to me that every country was under represented in the ’60 years+ ‘ category. In Canada, it was by 10 percentage points (roughly). For other countries the point spread was significantly wider. In Italy, it was a 30 percentage point spread (roughly).

I found the data in the Supplementary Materials yesterday (July 13, 2021). When I looked this morning, that information was no longer there but you will find what appears to be the questionnaire. I wonder if this removal is temporary or permanent and, if permanent, I wonder why it was removed.

Participants for the Canadian portion of the survey were supplied by Dynata, a US-based market research company. Here’s the company’s Wikipedia entry and its website.

Information about how participants were recruited was also missing this morning (July 14, 2021).

Genome British Columbia (Genome BC)

I was a little surprised when I couldn’t find any information about the program or the project on the Genome BC website as the organization is listed as a funder.

There is a ‘Genomics and Society’ tab (seems promising, eh?) on the homepage where you can find the answer to this question: What is GE³LS Research?,

GE3LS research is interdisciplinary, conducted by researchers across many disciplines within social science and humanities, including economics, environment, law, business, communications, and public policy.

There’s also a GE3LS Research in BC page titled Project Search; I had no luck there either.

It all seems a bit mysterious to me and, just in case anything else disappears off the web, here’s a July 13, 2021 news item about the research on phys.org as backup to what I have here.

Observing photo exposure one nanoscale grain at a time

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A June 9, 2015 news item on Nanotechnology Now highlights research into a common phenomenon, photographic exposure,

Photoinduced chemical reactions are responsible for many fundamental processes and technologies, from energy conversion in nature to micro fabrication by photo-lithography. One process that is known from everyday’s life and can be observed by the naked eye, is the exposure of photographic film. At DESY’s [Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron] X-ray light source PETRA III, scientists have now monitored the chemical processes during a photographic exposure at the level of individual nanoscale grains in real-time. The advanced experimental method enables the investigation of a broad variety of chemical and physical processes in materials with millisecond temporal resolution, ranging from phase transitions to crystal growth. The research team lead by Prof. Jianwei (John) Miao from the University of California in Los Angeles and Prof. Tim Salditt from the University of Göttingen report their technique and observations in the journal Nature Materials.

A June 9, 2015 DESY press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more detail about the research,

The researchers investigated a photographic paper (Kodak linagraph paper Type 2167 or “yellow burn paper”) that is often used to determine the position of the beam at X-ray experiments. “The photographic paper we looked at is not specially designed for X-rays. It works by changing its colour on exposure to light or X-rays,” explains DESY physicist Dr. Michael Sprung, head of the PETRA III beamline P10 where the experiments took place.

The X-rays were not only used to expose the photographic paper, but also to analyse changes of its inner composition at the same time. The paper carries a photosensitive film of a few micrometre thickness, consisting of tiny silver bromide grains dispersed in a gelatine matrix, and with an average size of about 700 nanometres. A nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre. When X-rays impinge onto such a crystalline grain, they are diffracted in a characteristic way, forming a unique pattern on the detector that reveals properties like crystal lattice spacing, chemical composition and orientation. “We could observe individual silver bromide grains within the ‘burn’ paper since the X-ray beam had a size of only 270 by 370 nanometres – smaller than the average grain,” says Salditt, who is a partner of DESY in the construction and operation of the GINIX (Göttingen Instrument for Nano-Imaging with X-Rays) at beamline P10.

The X-ray exposure starts the photolysis from silver bromide to produce silver. An absorbed X-ray photon can create many photolytic silver atoms, which grow and agglomerate at the surface and inside the silver bromide grain. The scientists observed how the silver bromide grains were strained, began to turn in the gelatine matrix and broke up into smaller crystallites as well as the growth of pure silver nano grains. The exceptionally bright beam of PETRA III together with a high-speed detector enabled the ‘filming’ of the process with up to five milliseconds temporal resolution. “We observed, for the first time, grain rotation and lattice deformation during photoinduced chemical reactions,” emphasises Miao. “We were actually surprised how fast some of these single grains rotate,” adds Sprung. “Some spin almost one time every two seconds.”

“As advanced synchrotron light sources are currently under rapid development in the US, Europe and Asia,” the authors anticipate that “in situ X-ray nanodiffraction, which enables to measure atomic resolution diffraction patterns with several millisecond temporal resolution, can be broadly applied to investigate phase transitions, chemical reactions, crystal growth, grain boundary dynamics, lattice expansion, and contraction in materials science, nanoscience, physics, and chemistry.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Grain rotation and lattice deformation during photoinduced chemical reactions revealed by in situ X-ray nanodiffraction by Zhifeng Huang, Matthias Bartels, Rui Xu, Markus Osterhoff, Sebastian Kalbfleisch, Michael Sprung, Akihiro Suzuki, Yukio Takahashi, Thomas N. Blanton, Tim Salditt, & Jianwei Miao. Nature Materials (2015) doi:10.1038/nmat4311 Published online 08 June 2015

This paper is behind a paywall.