It doesn’t matter where you live. There is no escaping rising food prices. Assuming you can still find physical ones instead of QR code versions, restaurant menus have telltale stickers with handwritten higher numbers. Supermarket shelves are filling up with packaged food that may appear to be roughly the same price, but with less content, a sneaky practice called shrinkflation.

The second edition of the Science and Innovation Forum, a key constituent of the annual flagship World Food Forum, closed here on Friday after three days of discussions and proposals on how technology can help agrifood systems deal with the climate crisis. The forum, which was held in hybrid form at the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), attracted hundreds of stakeholders from across the globe.

To bolster a full-spectrum response to the global need to achieve sustainable agrifood systems, the heads of two United Nations agencies announced a new initiative called Atoms4Food to offer Member countries assistance in strategic planning, increasing food production and food safety. Atoms4Food was unveiled on Wednesday at a special event on “Innovation Breakthroughs” held during World Food Forum 2023, hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Researchers from Kazakhstan identified genes that can be used to develop vaccines for bovine tuberculosis. The new vector vaccine may serve as an alternative to the currently used BCG vaccine. Bovine Tuberculosis is a respiratory disease that is caused by Mycobacterium bovis (M. bovis). It usually affects cattle but may also affect humans and domestic and wild animals in rare conditions. That's why it's crucial to develop vaccines with high safety and efficiency.

Researchers from the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the National Research Council of Italy found that the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission and Italian Prisma mission could be used to monitor nutrients in crops from a satellite. The nutritional content of crops is usually measured during the harvesting period. Nowadays, most satellites are not sensitive to crop nutrients. Hence, the researchers conducted a study that looked into the potential use of satellites to predict the nutritional value of staple crops, such as corn, rice, soybean, and wheat.

Researchers reviewed the impact of gene editing tools to the large animal field. They specifically focused on CRISPR-Cas and its usage on pigs for biomedical applications. The first batch of GM large animals was produced in 1985 to enhance the growth of agricultural livestock. Over the following decades, the genetic engineering of large animals primarily focused on biomedical applications instead of agriculture. In the article, researchers from the Hubei Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the University of Missouri reviewed the effects of gene editing on the livestock industry.

Scientists from the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, and the Pirbright Institute used gene editing techniques to identify and change parts of chicken DNA that could limit the spread of the bird flu virus in the animals.Using gene editing techniques, the team of scientists bred the chickens and altered the section of DNA responsible for producing the protein ANP32A, a molecule that flu viruses hijack during an infection to help replicate themselves.

A sustainable bioeconomy holds the key to many challenges we face today including eradication of poverty, inequality, hunger, malnutrition, addressing the impacts of the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation but we need strong leadership and effective policies to seize these opportunities, the FAO Director-General QU Dongyu said today at a special event organized by the Government of Brazil on the sidelines on the World Food Forum (16-20 October) at FAO headquarters in Rome.

The public consultation on the European Commission's proposals on New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) opened in Ireland on September 4, 2023, and ran for three weeks, closing on September 25. Ireland's Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine received 60 submissions to the consultation which sought the public's views on NGTs.

Experts from the University of Maryland, USA, reported two new Cas12a enzymes, Ev1Cas12a and Hs1Cas12a, that are particularly efficient at editing plant genomes. These enzymes have been tested for gene editing in rice, tomato, and poplar plants and showed high accuracy and efficiency. CRISPR-Cas12a is a powerful gene editing tool that is gaining popularity among scientists. Compared with Cas9, Cas12a has a unique ability to edit AT-rich genomic regions.