Every minute that passes, the world's population increases by hundreds, and food is needed to sustain it. To meet this food demand, various methods have been designed for decades. A recent one under discussion is “gene editing.” Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay This method, unlike any other method, is based on natural processes in plants, i.e. the basic mechanism of the cell, which allows researchers to cut out specific or "unwanted" parts of the DNA to control plant traits. plants as required. The cell's mechanism repairs itself and therefore functions like a normal cell. Gene editing involves a method known as CRISPR – Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats or CRISPR Cas9. Cas9 is the enzyme produced by the Crispr system that binds to DNA and cuts it, turning off the targeted gene. In some cases it is also possible to use the Cas3 enzyme. There's one called Sherlock that targets RNA instead of DNA. First reported in Archaea by Francisco Mojica, a Spanish scientist, in 1993, CRISPRs were identified as part of the bacterial immune system. These consisted of repeating genetic sequences with spacers (non-coding sequences of DNA) between them. Several researchers, working independently, later published similar results. Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, Massachusetts He was the first to successfully use CRISPR Cas9 for genome editing in eukaryotic cells. It involves the following mechanism: The gene of interest is first identified and its complementary RNA (known as “guide RNA”) and enzyme are created accordingly. The guide RNA and enzyme are then introduced into the cell. The guide RNA then localizes and binds to its paired DNA sequence and the Cas9 enzyme. The enzyme cuts the DNA strands and removes the sequence due to which a mutation is introduced. After the sequence is removed, the cell repairs itself and the guide RNA and enzyme are removed. This resulting plant is then crossed with the original one, as occurs in traditional breeding. The advantage of this technique is that there is no need to pair CRISPR with separate cutting enzymes, as it can cut DNA strands on its own. It can target multiple genes at once and, because it does not involve introducing genes from other species, it is a much simpler, cheaper and faster process than GMOs developed using traditional breeding methods. It has been used to develop various crops with desirable characteristics, among which Lippmann tomatoes are popular, created by Zach Lippmann, a New York plant biologist, and Van Eck, his collaborator at the Boyce Thompson Institute in Ithaca, New York. They experimented with different genes in the tomato plant to study every desirable trait possible. This has led to the development of tomatoes that are more nutritious, resistant to pests and able to adapt to erratically changing climate conditions. Furthermore, their branching is modified by decreasing the activity of certain genes so that tomatoes are easier to detach from the plant. The technique helped produce satisfactory results in less than a year, which gave hope that better varieties could be developed more efficiently and could solve the food shortage problem. CRISPR has been used in many other food crops, some of which are: Wheat: to produce crops with low gluten content. Maize: To develop modified varieties that can produce more grain in drought conditions. Coffee: for.