Gene technology, industry by industry
We write about the practical end of genetics: the vectors that carry a corrected gene into a cell, the enzymes that replace a chemical step in a factory, the traits that change how a field is sprayed, and the laws that decide which of those reach anyone at all.
Each guide takes one sector, explains the mechanism in ordinary words, names the organisations that matter and sets out where the arguments actually sit.
How Luxturna, Zolgensma and Casgevy differ in what they do to a genome, why adeno-associated virus has a cargo limit, what lymphodepletion means before a CAR-T infusion, and why one-off treatments break the way health systems normally pay for medicines.
Bt cotton and the refuge strategy, the Rainbow papaya and ringspot virus, Golden Rice and provitamin A, the non-browning mushroom, AquAdvantage salmon, and why the European Union regulates the process while the United States regulates the product.
Fermentation-produced chymosin in cheese, recombinant insulin as the first of its kind, detergent proteases and feed phytase, soy leghemoglobin in plant-based burgers, and the three numbers a fermentation plant lives by: titre, rate and yield.
Oxitec's engineered Aedes aegypti, Target Malaria's staged work on Anopheles gambiae, blight-tolerant American chestnut carrying a wheat gene, environmental DNA surveys, and why reversibility is the hardest question in the field.
The Court of Justice ruling that pulled gene editing into the EU's GMO rules, the UK Precision Breeding Act, the US Coordinated Framework, the Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, CRISPR patent disputes, and the line between somatic and heritable editing.
We try to define terms where they appear, but a handful run through every guide, and it helps to have them in one place before you start.
Two ideas sit underneath all five guides. The first is that the laboratory step is rarely the bottleneck: delivery, manufacture, field performance and approval decide whether anything ships. The second is that the same technique is governed completely differently depending on which industry it lands in — an edit in a tomato, a mosquito and a patient meet three separate legal regimes, often in the same country.