In a study published in the journal Sustainability, biotech corn farmers from the Philippines were asked about their perceptions and attitudes about the Supreme Court's bans on biotech crops implemented in 2015. The findings highlighted the importance of farmer consultations in policy framing and implementation. In 2021, the Philippines approved Bt eggplant for food, feed, or processing; and Golden Rice for cultivation.

ISAAA Inc., BioTrust Global, the Malaysian Biotechnology Information Center, Murdoch University, and the National Seed Association Malaysia will hold the workshop Policy Considerations for Gene Editing: The Asian and Australian Perspective from August 23 to 25, 2022 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Scientists from the University of California, Riverside, and the University of Delaware have found a way to bypass biological photosynthesis and create food without sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis. The research team used a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate, the form of the main component of vinegar.

Across many parts of rural Gambia, women farmers often start their days before dawn to ensure that they have enough water to irrigate their gardens and to cook, clean and bathe at home. “Some of us would wake up as early as 3.00 a.m. to 4.00 a.m. just to get water. Hyenas attacked us on three different occasions,” said Salla Bah, a vegetable farmer in the Central River Region in the north of the Gambia.

A series of online workshops have identified nine recommendations to advance the future environmental risk assessment of gene drive applications. The recommendations came from an exercise that identified potential harms from simulated investigational releases of a population suppression gene drive for malaria vector control. The World Health Organization reported that in 2020, there were 228 million cases of malaria, resulting in 602,000 deaths in the African region.

Researchers from the Synthetic Microbiology Center Marburg in Germany presented a versatile scarless and marker-free genome editing system in their latest publication in Nature Communications. CRISPR SWAPnDROP can perform indels consecutively or in parallel and transfer chromosomal regions between species of independent size and with high-editing efficiencies.

Researchers from Northeast Forestry University and partners reported a gene that can positively control photosynthetic inhibition and oxidative damage in Arabidopsis under saline conditions. Their findings are published in Frontiers in Plant Science. The research team overexpressed MYB37, a R2R3 MYB subgroup 14 transcription factor in Arabidopsis, which confers hyposensitivity to salt.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) Panel on genetically modified organisms (GMO Panel) has published their risk assessment of new sequencing information for genetically modified (GM) stacked cotton DAS-24236-5 × DAS-21Ø23-5. The GMO Panel has previously assessed GM cotton DAS-24236-5 × DAS-21Ø23-5 in application EFSA-GMO-NL-2005-16.

The International Food Policy Research Institute and economists from Tanzania, Nigeria, Uganda, and Ghana analyzed the expected economic benefits from the adoption of genetically modified (GM) crops in five sub-Saharan African countries. The results of their study show that substantial economic benefits are gained by both farmers and consumers from the timely adoption and planting in farmers' fields of GM crops through an efficient regulatory system.

Using CRISPR-Cas9, researchers from Texas A&M University were able to produce rice with an increased amount of resistant starch. The findings can help develop rice that is more beneficial for human health and possibly reduce the risk of diet-related chronic diseases. Resistant starch is commonly found in cereal crops. It is not easily digestible nor absorbed by the small intestine, and is passed on to the large intestine which helps make the elimination of waste more efficient.