Eucalyptus for the climate and soil conditions of Tocantins
By Cristiano Bueno de Moraes, forestry engineer, with support from the Tocantins Research Support Foundation
Law No. 9.456, known as the Cultivar Protection Law (LPC), completed 25 years of existence this year. Its implementation was responsible for ensuring intellectual property rights in the development of commercial plant varieties in Brazil. It enabled regulation, investment in innovation and the growth of the national seed market, guaranteeing quality seeds and seedlings to rural producers. This was one of the forces that made Brazilian agribusiness become one of the most thriving sectors and the basis of the country's economy.
However, over these 25 years, new technologies in the area of Genetics have emerged and changed the Brazilian and global seed markets. The development of genetically modified (GM) plants in the mid-1990s was one of them. Since then, and to this day, transgenics or GM plants add a series of characteristics of interest, especially resistance to insects and tolerance to herbicides.
The global adoption of GM crops has increased hundreds of times in the last two decades, bringing many benefits to all of agriculture, but with a special impact on the seed production sector. For example, technologies associated with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have become fundamental for sustainable food production. Without them, the direct planting system would not be viable to the extent it is used today in Brazil, given its immense synergy with herbicide-resistant transgenic plants.
The regulatory structures that were created in each country to assess the biosafety of GMOs, however, made the process of their commercial release too expensive and prolonged. This ended up establishing very complex and often unnecessary requirements for risk assessment. In practice, the use of GMOs has been limited to a few companies that can afford a commercial release. Another effect caused by this excessively complex regulation was to limit the use of technology to a few crops with high economic returns, such as agricultural commodities.
However, technological evolution did not stop at transgenics. In the last ten years, the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) genome editing technique was developed. This is a more precise, faster and cheaper DNA manipulation tool when compared to previous gene editing techniques (zinc fingers, TALENs, meganucleases, etc.).
One of the differences in Edited Organisms (EOs) is the possibility of altering the DNA of the target species without the need to insert DNA from other species, which exists in the case of transgenics. This is especially true when genome editing is done using “site-directed mutation” strategies, which resemble naturally occurring mutations.
In this context, many countries have considered OEs, using these strategies as conventional. In other words, these are organisms that have undergone mutations similar to those that already occur in nature or that were obtained using other established techniques for producing genetic variability, such as classical breeding and the induction of mutations by ionizing radiation or chemical agents.
Aligned with these nations, through the National Technical Biosafety Commission (CTNBio), Brazil established Normative Resolution No. 16 (RN16), which regulated the use of gene editing, here called Innovative Precision Improvement Techniques (TIMP). RN16 provides that analysis requests are forwarded to CTNBio through a consultation letter and are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Depending on the type of gene editing performed, the organism in question may not be considered GM, that is, it will be categorized as a conventional organism.
The opportunities for an organism that, even though its genome has been edited through the introduction of a certain characteristic of interest, is considered conventional are enormous. Starting with reducing costs, as it is not necessary to go through a complex deregulation process, different from what happens with GMOs. Biosafety is preserved, as there is a pre-analysis by regulatory agencies.
But the main gain is from a technological point of view. There is added value and the possibility of solving previously difficult challenges, which took decades to be resolved, or even problems that were previously impossible to be resolved via classical improvement. Through the CRISPR technique, at more reasonable costs and with the speed that agribusiness needs, these obstacles can now be overcome.
However, the LPC, when implemented, did not foresee this technological evolution in genome editing, which, depending on the technique used, makes it impossible to know whether the mutation(s) introduced were made by the human being or by nature. In this sense, the LPC must be modernized so that the scientific and technological investment made in the development of a new commercial variety based on these technologies is rewarded. Otherwise, the use of this important tool to produce genetic variability, bringing new solutions to problems and adding value to agribusiness products, will not have its full potential explored.
By Alexandre Nepomuceno, Embrapa Soya
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By Cristiano Bueno de Moraes, forestry engineer, with support from the Tocantins Research Support Foundation
With a 3.500-liter spray tank and booms of up to 36 meters, the MF 535R sprayer, tested by our team, stands out for its engine and transmission integration, in addition to the onboard technology, which allows it to carry out very precise applications, with nozzle-to-nozzle cutting. and stable flow rate