Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Bola bam Here. Back in September, we
Speaker 1: did an episode about Crisper, the genetic engineering tool that's
Speaker 1: based on how bacteria protect themselves from viruses. Often compared
Speaker 1: to a pair of molecular scissors. Crisper uses specialized proteins
Speaker 1: called casts a short for Crisper associated enzymes to cut
Speaker 1: strands of DNA or RNA at a precise, preprogrammed location.
Speaker 1: Then the system can insert or remove the desired gene
Speaker 1: at that site, and while a gene edited organism. Today,
Speaker 1: we wanted to talk about a few ways that the
Speaker 1: technology is being experimented with, for example, growing spicy tomatoes
Speaker 1: and decaf coffee beans. Imagine biting into a vine ripened tomato.
Speaker 1: What flavors come to mind? Sweet? Bright? Maybe a little savory?
Speaker 1: What about spice? See Thanks to an international team of geneticists,
Speaker 1: that might be the future flavor profile of some tomatoes.
Speaker 1: Researchers in Brazil and Ireland have proposed Crisper as a
Speaker 1: means of activating dormant capsaiusnoid jeans in tomato plants. The
Speaker 1: same genetic sequence that gives chilies their kick. In addition
Speaker 1: to creating the perfect bloody Mary, the plants promise an
Speaker 1: economical alternative to traditional peppers, which are notoriously tricky to grow.
Speaker 1: Crisper can also offer a boost to your daily breakfast routine,
Speaker 1: or rather take the boost away. A United Kingdom company
Speaker 1: is currently developing a coffee bean engineered to grow caffeine free.
Speaker 1: That's a big deal because today's coffee beans have to
Speaker 1: be chemically decaffeinated, usually by soaking them an ethyl acetate
Speaker 1: or methylene chloride. This harsh chemical bath strips out both
Speaker 1: the beans caffeine and some of their flavor. Crisper Coffee
Speaker 1: promises a jitter free cup of Joe with all the
Speaker 1: roasty goodness of full cat. But what about no hangover wine.
Speaker 1: If you've ever wished you could have a night out
Speaker 1: on the town without suffering a head splitting hangover the
Speaker 1: next morning, you might be in luck. A team of
Speaker 1: scientists at the University of Illinois have used their genetic
Speaker 1: scissors to boost the health benefits of a strain of
Speaker 1: yeast that's used to ferment wine, and they've snipped out
Speaker 1: the genes responsible for next day headaches. Zacora mices sarah
Speaker 1: de si a. The yeast in question is a polyploid organism,
Speaker 1: meaning that it has many copies of every gene, as
Speaker 1: opposed to the sometimes usual too. This feature makes the
Speaker 1: yeast both highly adaptable and extremely difficult to genetically engineer
Speaker 1: using older methods, which could only target one copy of
Speaker 1: a gene at a time, But Crisper allows genetic engineers
Speaker 1: to cut across every single version of a gene in
Speaker 1: one go. Using it, the Illinois team was able to
Speaker 1: boost the amount of heart healthy resveratrol in their wine
Speaker 1: while leaving the hangover on the cutting room floor. Of course,
Speaker 1: altering plants is one thing. What about animals. Let's look
Speaker 1: at the thorny case of horns and cattle. When it
Speaker 1: comes to cattle farming, horns are usually a no go
Speaker 1: on a fully grown bull. They pose danger to the farmer,
Speaker 1: the other cattle, and occasionally to the animal itself. Traditionally,
Speaker 1: farm raised cattle are d horned by annihilating the horn
Speaker 1: producing cells on the animal's forehead, located on two bony
Speaker 1: proturbances called horn buds. The buds are destroyed by one
Speaker 1: of several different painful means by cutting them out with
Speaker 1: knives or by applying hot irons, electricity, or caustic substances
Speaker 1: like sodium hydroxide. These practices can sometimes lead to facial
Speaker 1: disfigurement or eye damage, but crisper might just offer a
Speaker 1: more ethical alternative. Using crisper, scientists of engineered a gene
Speaker 1: for hornlessness in cattle, effectively eliminating the need for horn
Speaker 1: removal process in those animals. Even more interestingly, some of
Speaker 1: these gene edited bulls have been able to pass the
Speaker 1: trade onto their offspring, which is crucial for keeping the
Speaker 1: trade in population circulation in scientific circles. This has been
Speaker 1: seen as a potentially huge success story. Historically, the general
Speaker 1: public has had less enthusiasm for gene tweaked crops and livestock,
Speaker 1: although recent research suggests that those attitudes may be changing.
Speaker 1: But what if crisper were used for something a little
Speaker 1: less Charlotte's Web and a little more Jurassic Park. Perhaps
Speaker 1: the most far out used for crisper at the moment
Speaker 1: is its potential to bring back entire species from the dead,
Speaker 1: and right now there's serious talk about resurrecting one particular species,
Speaker 1: the passenger pigeon. Passenger pigeons used to rove the forests
Speaker 1: of North America in flocks hundreds of millions strong, darkening
Speaker 1: the skies and thundering through woods and what conservationist although
Speaker 1: Leopold described as a feathered tempest. However, that started to
Speaker 1: change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as European colonists
Speaker 1: radiated across the continent. In addition to being ubiquitous, passenger
Speaker 1: pigeons had the unfortunate quality of being delicious. They were
Speaker 1: hunted in mass by hungry euro Americans, both for food
Speaker 1: and sport. This probably wouldn't have been as devastating to
Speaker 1: the bird's total population, except the colonists simultaneously destroyed much
Speaker 1: of their nesting grounds. This brutal combination drove the species
Speaker 1: into steep decline by the early twenty century. The last
Speaker 1: known passenger pigeon, a bird named Martha, died in captivity
Speaker 1: in nineteen fourteen. Now scientists are looking to crisper as
Speaker 1: a way to bring these iconic birds back. A California
Speaker 1: based biotech organization called Revive and Restore has a dedicated
Speaker 1: passenger pigeon project, which aims to re establish the species
Speaker 1: by modifying the genome of the closely related band tailed pigeon.
Speaker 1: If successful, the group says they could use this approach
Speaker 1: to resurrect all kinds of extinct or critically endangered creatures,
Speaker 1: from the black footed ferret to the wooly mammoth. Whether
Speaker 1: or not they should is, of course, still a matter
Speaker 1: of some debate, but there's no denying that Crisper has
Speaker 1: brought stuff of science fiction into the realm of the
Speaker 1: potentially possible. Today's episode is based on the article spicy
Speaker 1: Tomatoes hangover proof Wine. Is there anything Crisper Can't do?
Speaker 1: On how Stuff Works dot Com? Written by Joanna Thompson.
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Speaker 1: with how stuff Works dot Com, and it is produced
Speaker 1: by Tyler Clay. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio
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