With every passing minute, the world's population is increasing by the hundreds, and to support this ever-growing population, food is necessary. To meet this food demand, various methods have been devised for decades. A recent topic under discussion is “gene editing”. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essay This method, unlike any other method, is based on the natural processes of plants, i.e. basic machinery of the cell, which allows researchers to cut specific or “unwanted” parts of DNA to control plant traits as needed. The cellular machinery repairs itself automatically and then functions like a normal cell. Gene editing involves a method known as CRISPR – Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats or CRISPR Cas9. Cas9 here is the enzyme produced by the Crispr system that binds to and cuts DNA, thereby turning off the targeted gene. In some cases, the Cas3 enzyme can also be used. 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 involved repeating gene sequences with spacers (non-coding DNA sequences) between them. Different researchers, working independently, subsequently published similar results. Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard's McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, Massachusetts, was the first to successfully use CRISPR Cas9 for genome editing in eukaryotic cells. This involves the following mechanism: The gene of interest is first identified and, therefore, its complementary RNA (called “guide RNA”) and enzyme are created. The guide RNA and enzyme are then introduced into the cell. The guide RNA localizes and then 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, as in traditional breeding. The advantage of this technique is that CRISPRs do not need to be associated with separate cleaving enzymes, since they are capable of cutting DNA strands themselves. It can target several genes simultaneously and, as it does not involve the introduction of genes from other species, it is a much simpler, cheaper and faster process than GMOs developed by methods of traditional selection. It has been used to develop various crops with desirable characteristics, Lippmann tomatoes being one of the most popular, created by Zach Lippmann, a plant biologist in New York 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 all possible desirable traits. This has led to the development of tomatoes that are more nutritious, more resistant to pests and able to adapt to irregularly changing climatic conditions. In addition, their branching is modified by decreasing the activity of certain genes so that the tomatoes are easier to pull from the plant. The technique achieved satisfactory results in less than a year, giving hope that better varieties could be developed more efficiently and could solve the shortage problem..