Field Trials and Baking Studies of Ultra-Low Asparagine, Genome Edited (CRISPR/Cas9) and Mutant (TILLING) Wheat.
Kaur N, Raffan S, Clark SJ, Musa S, Scherf K
Summary
PubMedWhy it matters This matters because every time you toast bread or bake cookies, a potentially cancer-linked chemical called acrylamide forms — and this research shows that simply swapping to a gene-edited wheat flour could reduce that chemical by up to 93%, making everyday foods meaningfully safer without changing how you cook.
When wheat is baked at high temperatures, a natural building block in the grain reacts to form acrylamide, a worrying chemical found in browned or toasted foods. Researchers tweaked the genes in wheat plants so they make much less of this building block, and when they baked the resulting flour into real bread, toast, and biscuits, the acrylamide levels dropped dramatically — in some cases disappearing entirely. Crucially, the edited wheat plants grew just as well in real farm fields as regular wheat, suggesting this could be a practical, scalable solution.
chevron_right Technical Details
Scientists used gene editing (CRISPR) and chemical mutation to create wheat varieties that produce far less of a natural amino acid called asparagine. When baked into bread, toast, and biscuits, these wheats generate dramatically less acrylamide — a harmful chemical linked to cancer that forms when starchy foods are cooked at high heat.
Key Findings
Wheat with both TaASN1 and TaASN2 genes knocked out using CRISPR had 93% less free asparagine in the grain and produced acrylamide levels below detection in bread, with only 8% of normal acrylamide even after 4 minutes of toasting.
Biscuits made from the dual-gene CRISPR wheat showed a 93% reduction in acrylamide compared to the control, demonstrating the benefit extends beyond bread to other baked goods.
The gene-edited (CRISPR) wheat lines showed no reduction in crop yield over two years of field trials, while the chemically mutated (TILLING) lines achieved a 50% asparagine reduction but did suffer yield penalties.
Abstract Preview
Field trials were conducted of wheat (Triticum aestivum) cv. Cadenza in which asparagine synthetase gene, TaASN2, had been knocked out, either on its own or together with a partial knockout of the ...
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