This is the title of an article I stumbled across from MIT Technology Review.
I've written previouslyabout how the nature of GMO's are changing. Instead of taking a gene from bacteria and randomly splicing it into the genome of a plant (transgenic modification), scientists and breeders are becoming much more precise - adding a single DNA base pair to disrupt a gene with CRISPR/Cas9 technology (subgenic modification). Moving a gene from a wild potato to a commercial variety to provide resistance to pests (cisgenic modification) If someone makes a plant in this way, with the result being a genome that could easily have occurred randomly by chance, is it still a GMO? The answer appears to be no for US regulators, at least for subgenic modifications.
In the next twist in the GMO debate, we're skipping genetic modification altogether; we're just going to start crop-dusting plants with RNA.
A brief biology lesson: the central dogma of molecular biology is that DNA is transcribed into RNA, which is then translated into protein - protein was long thought to be the molecule within cells that actually does stuff. A GMO plant has had its DNA modified so that it produces a protein that wasn't there before - the two most relevant examples being a protein that produces resistance to the herbicide glyphosate (RoundUp) and a protein that functions as an insecticide, the Bt toxin. A tremendous amount of the interesting work in molecular biology is finding the situation that break the central dogma. One being the realization that lots of RNA is made than doesn't code for proteins. Then we realized that this non-coding RNA actually does stuff. Then, Craig Mello and Andrew Fire won the Nobel prize for discovering RNA interference (RNAi) - some of this RNA can actually destroy other RNA.
RNAi has been used extensively for the last 15 or so years to study biological processes - it has allowed researchers to relatively easily disrupt the production of any protein of interest. If you destroy all of the RNA that would be translated into a protein, no protein is produced. It is much much easier to produce large quantities of RNA and inject it into a cell than it is to go in and specifically modify the DNA of the cell.
Hopefully I've written this diary enough that you can see where this is going. Instead of creating a GMO, just spray the plants with RNA. Pests eating crops - be they viruses, bacteria, fungus, or insects - spray the crop with an RNA that degrades an essential gene in the pest and voila!
It is likely that the biggest hurdle will be delivery - for the RNA to work, it has to get inside cells. But RNA has numerous advantages. It's ubiquitous in nature and already exists in every bite of food that we eat. It's extremely specific - RNA pesticides can easily be designed to target only a pest and not a bumble-bee. It's short-lived, rapidly bio-degrading over a few days. It's non-allergenic. And, it's not a GMO.
If you're interested, the article at MIT Technology Review goes into more detail and is easy to understand.