Monsanto to tweak genes in GMOs using unregulated method

Monsanto hopes to get around restrictions on GMOs by using unregulated method to tweak genes

Monsanto, one of the world’s leading producers of foods containing genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, recently announced that they were getting away from the GMO game slightly as they have purchased a new technology from the Broad Institute. This new method, CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, allows scientists to manipulate DNA on a very granular scale. This modification, in turn, will allow produce to survive harsher conditions such as a drought and will also prevent fruits and vegetables from turning brown.

This isn’t the first instance of a major company going around the restrictions placed on GMOs, though. Back in April, DuPont Pioneer, the fourth largest chemical corporation in the world, announced that they intended on marketing the first new type of hybrid corn by 2021. This corn would be modified genetically through the use of CRISPR-Cas9.